Short Story by Evie Groch
They all looked fascinating on paper, and he had to decide whom to meet in person. How?
The Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth (Latest News) is a national daily newspaper published in Tel Aviv, founded in 1939. It considers Yosi Fleischman a celebrated journalist. He used to cover the top breaking stories, like the Six-Day War and the raid on Entebbe, but today, in his late seventies, he is no longer given these stories. They are assigned to younger writers with more stamina and insights. He doesn’t mind… much. Yosi rather enjoys shaping the feature stories he’s now assigned. He carves them out of hard data and polishes them to honor his subjects, those who flew under the radar and didn’t get the attention he and his paper believed they deserved.
With the offices of the paper in central Tel Aviv, it’s convenient for Yosi to meet with his story leads, who are now mostly found in retirement homes, skilled care facilities, and gated communities. He senses freedom to draw out stories from immigrants who have come from various countries for various reasons and use his superb listening skills to weave together unheard of and hard to believe adventures these travelers have endured. One full-length story a week is his assignment, and to do a job he is proud of, he has to put in a week’s worth of time. Each feature column ends with his now familiar quote: “When you are the voice for others, others will speak for you.”
This week, he finds himself with several candidates. They had each made it safely to Israel and settled in, some when the land was harsh and dry and subsistence a challenge on many fronts: language, skills, age, health, income, work, education. More recent arrivals sought asylum from regimes steeped in anti-Semitism and Fascism. Each was a voice for the voiceless, each a beacon guiding many to safety.
A strong contender for this week’s feature is Beba Epstein Leventhal. Through a 2012 article in the New York Times about families looking to explore their genealogy and find missing pieces of their heritage, Yosi found Beba Epstein Leventhal. He tracked her down in Rehovot and set up a time to meet with her. Her stark and earnest beauty at 88 years of age hint at what she must have looked like when she was a young woman. Her hair is a silky grey, a soft cloud set atop a head of wisdom and wit. The picture of her as a young dark-haired child sits on her dresser and reflects the same sparkle in her eyes as she now exhibits. The child is still inside of her.
Beba tells Yosi she has never shared the events of her life before and during the Holocaust, but is ready now. Yosi steadies himself to take in what he expects to be an extraordinary story.
Beba, the eldest of her siblings, was living in Vilna, Poland, with her family, when the Nazis invaded and scattered her family. She hid out alone in the attic of a nearby Gentile officer’s house whose family lived downstairs. When she had given up hope of reconnecting with her family members, she abandoned her hiding place and smuggled herself into the Vilna ghetto to find them. She was too late. They had perished in Ponar, present-day Lithuania, in the massacre of 100,000 people by German SD, SS and Lithuanian Nazi collaborators. Now she found herself trapped in the Vilna ghetto, alone and vulnerable. She was seized and sent to three different concentration camps, which she miraculously survived. The last camp, Stuffhof, was liberated May 9, 1945, where about 100 prisoners who had managed to hide during the final evacuation of the camp were found, Beba among them.
“Yosi,” whispered Beba. “Come closer. I have a confession to make to you now that the truth is coming out.”
Yosi braced himself for a deep secret.
“I’m not really 88. I’m 89.”
A smile spreads across Yosi’s face. Is it vanity at this age, or had there been a strategic reason for this lie? He decides not to ask, but he nods his head in reassurance that he will keep her secret.
Through a resettlement organization, Beba found her uncle Lasar Epstein, who helped her get to Israel, where she met and married Elias Leventhal. They both became active in Labor Committees, Family Service organizations, and the Russian Resettlement Unit. Beba felt she couldn’t do enough to contribute to the welfare of refugees, one of whom she had been. Elias and Beba had two children, both now living in California: Mary, a psychiatrist, and Michael, an attorney.
Yosi could have predicted the occupation of her children. Many offspring of Holocaust survivors went into psychiatry and law. He had seen this trend. He believes that the study of psychiatry is a way sons and daughters try to make sense of their parents’ horrific trauma and ultimately help them. Law serves as a field with which to redress wrongs inflicted on the victims.
Ilia Kaminsky’s poetry came into Yosi’s sight via a book someone had placed on his desk in Tel Aviv. This Russian immigrant has already been awarded prizes for the music with which his words resonate. His luminous and lyrical brushstrokes paint sensory scenes one has to have lived through to understand, yet he invites the reader to feel all of them through his writing. This comes across strongly when he describes Odessa as “a city famous for its drunk sailors, huge gravestones of rabbis, horse owners, and horse thieves, and most of all, for its stuffed and baked fish.” Yosi can envision and smell the descriptions. They awaken his senses. Citizens from all parts of the former USSR can find a voice in Ilia’s poems which resonate with them and capture the intricacies and hardships of their life under Soviet rule.
Yosi found Ilia living in Haifa and set out to visit him. He didn’t realize until he was in his presence that Ilia was deaf. At the age of four, when he lost his hearing, he began to see voices.
“They guide me,” he shares with Yosi, “in writing for the masses and for the individual soul who cannot speak or hear for himself. I am their spokesperson.”
Ilia was granted permission to leave the USSR in 1993 and settled in Haifa, intent on expressing his missing link to his former country, which can no longer be found. He dreams of citizens meeting to conduct elections that never happen.
When asked what his greatest achievement is, he responds,
“The proudest achievement I want to share with you isn’t a prize, but the diploma I received in 2004 when I graduated from law school.”
Yosi fully understands and congratulates him. He could have predicted this as well.
Yosi’s third candidate for honors recognition started her life in Belgium. Jeanne Daman was a young teacher in Brussels in 1942, when she became aware that its Jewish community was setting up its own kindergartens after the children were no longer allowed to attend school with non-Jewish students. Jeanne was Catholic, had previously not known any Jews, but had grown up with a strong sense of right and wrong. She heard about Fela Perelman, who served as a leading figure in the rescue efforts for Jewish children. Fela was looking for trained educators for the children left without schools. Jeanne contacted her and joined the staff of her school to help educate some 325 children. She also began to take an active part in the rescue of Jewish children.
A daily school conversation might start with:
“Mrs. Daman, where is Sofia today?” coming from a student.
Struggling to answer, Jeanne would attempt to downplay the absences, saying,
“Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out and keep everyone safe.”
More than likely, they would never see Sofia again.
Soon every school day, some children were absent. Their families had been rounded up. Other children became instant orphans when their parents were taken away while they were at school. It soon became clear the school had to be closed to save the children. Jeanne found ways to whisk the children to safety and began to work with the Jewish underground. After the war, she assisted in returning young Jewish orphans to their families and helped with fundraising for Israel.
Yosi was aware that Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust honoring not only Jews who fought against their Nazi oppressors but also Gentiles who selflessly aided Jews in need, had already installed Jeanne Daman’s name as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, but so few actually knew about her. He wanted to change that. He was on his way to meet her in Petach Tikva, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, for an appointment he had made a week ago. When he arrived at her address, he learned she had passed away. He sighed deeply, as though someone had robbed him of a great treasure. He couldn’t bring himself to cross her name off the list.
Yosi had prepared the two potential feature articles and handed them to his editor. He couldn’t choose between them and asked his editor to make the final decision. It was understood that the feature not selected for this week would run the next week. The editor agreed.
Sunday evening, before the Monday edition, which was to carry one of his features, Yosi went to bed early and passed away peacefully in his sleep. A neighbor had stopped to look in on him and found him with a contented look on his face, as though his work had been done. While the neighbor was there, the phone rang, and the neighbor gave Yosi’s editor the sad news.
Monday’s Yedioth Ahronoth’s feature article was a surprise to its readers. The headline was devoted to Yosi Fleischman, about whom people knew very little. Only the paper’s editor was privy to biographical data about him, and even he needed assistance to put all the pieces together.
Yosi had been orphaned when he was two months old. He had been born in an unnamed concentration camp in Germany. The Nazis didn’t know his mother was pregnant, and she gave birth in secrecy. Knowing she couldn’t keep him safe, she wrote out his brief history and pinned it to a cloth serving as a makeshift diaper. She had him smuggled out as a bundle of rags by a guard she had given favors to. Apparently, this guard had a conscience of sorts and found the boy a home with a childless German family who raised him as their own. They never kept the truth from him, and he grew up honoring them in the first column he wrote as a feature article for Yedioth Ahronoth. After the German family helped him migrate to Israel, he nominated them for an inscription at Yad Vashem. The article revealed that he had attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he studied both psychiatry and law and achieved a degree in both from graduate studies. The article ended with: “When you are the voice for others, others will speak for you.”
He had never written about himself, for he never believed he had done anything heroic. The readers of his column begged to differ. Thousands of letters poured into the editor’s lauding Yosi’s work over the ages and his interest in speaking for the victims and their saviors. Interestingly enough, he never saw himself as a victim, only as a tool to unlock the histories of others and honor their struggles. Many of the letters were published over the next several weeks, and retired writers and journalists wrote to the editor volunteering their time to continue Yosi’s work of honoring those who deserved to be honored.
Evie Groch’s opinion pieces, humor, poems, short stories, and memoir vignettes, along with other articles, have been published in the New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, in anthologies and on many online venues. She writes of travel, language, immigration, and justice.
