One early morning in April, Gertrud stepped outside and came face-to-face with a skeletal prisoner, an escapee from the concentration camp, a Jew, cowering in the alley. In his memoir Abraham recounts how he pleads with the terrified German woman to hide him, makes the case that it is in her best interest: the war is nearly over, he says, and then it will be bad for the Germans; I will defend you, he says. Initially she wavers, she’s afraid, she’s a refugee herself, but then relents. She takes him to the cellar, to the potato box. Abraham does not mention the grandfather, Gertrud’s father, not then, not later. Gertrud’s children said it happened a little differently: they said that Gertrud did not make the decision on her own, that their Opa knew about Abraham, had given his approval to hide the Jew. According to the children, which is to say according to Gertrud, it was even more dramatic than what Abraham had described: they said that German soldiers arrived soon after, searching for Abraham; Gertrud, her children said, had poured water on the steps in order to mask Abraham’s scent from the dogs. Rita claimed that a soldier even opened the box Abraham was hidden in—but did not see him, as he was well concealed beneath the potatoes.
Abraham stayed in the cellar, in the box, for more than a month. Alexander and Helga said that they had no idea anything was amiss. Rita said that she did know, claimed her mother had confided in her and occasionally tasked her with bringing food down to Abraham. Alexander and Helga said they had noticed their mother making extra food and disappearing into the cellar, but had never suspected anything. Alexander said that, later, after the war, Gertrud had said to him that he had been the most difficult to deceive, because he, the youngest, was always following her.
Abraham writes that he spent the month in isolation, punctured only by his savior’s nightly visits. The children told me that Opa would also go down and visit Abraham; Alexander said that Opa would bring Abraham clothes and liquor, and that sometimes at night he would bring Abraham out to the yard.
By all accounts, including Abraham’s, including the children’s, liberation happened very suddenly. Helga and Alexander told me that that morning they were in the attic, watching through the window as German soldiers retreated and Soviet soldiers emerged from the forest. (Rita was not home; she told me she was likely at the hospital, where she worked as a nurse.) At some point the children came downstairs or were beckoned downstairs and encountered in the kitchen the two adults they knew—their mother and their grandfather—and one they did not, a man wearing the striped uniform, an inmate of the concentration camp, a Jew. (Abraham had been given new clothes by Gertrud but had put on the concentration camp uniform in preparation for his liberation, probably in order to help explain to the Soviet soldiers who he was and that these Germans had saved him.) Abraham described the moment of his liberation differently. He wrote that he was inside the potato box when he heard frighteningly unfamiliar footsteps, and suddenly “someone opened the lid with a strong jerk, brutally threw back the blanket, grabbed my neck, and shined a flashlight in my eyes. I was terrified.” It was a Soviet soldier. “You’re free!” he said.
Abraham wrote that he walked outside, contemplated his freedom, and then his unnamed savior took him by the arm, led him back into the house so he could wash and shave, and then he left again, presumably for good. This is the end of the memoir. What he does the next day—it does not say. The years Abraham spent in Poland after the war had always been opaque to me. All I knew was that at some point Abraham brought his manuscript to Ostoja, and in 1948 or 1949 immigrated to Israel.
From Gertrud’s children I learned that Abraham did not in fact leave Gertrud. He stayed, for months, for a year, for perhaps as long as two years, stayed with Gertrud and her children and her father. Abraham and Gertrud had a relationship; they were lovers. The children adored him. They called him Poppa. Alexander told me stories of going fishing with Abraham, and how his mother and Abraham went for bicycle rides in the countryside, often sharing a single bike. Opa and Abraham would spend hours together, the children told me, drinking homemade liquor and chatting. Abraham took on the role of the breadwinner. There were severe shortages, the family didn’t have enough to eat, so Abraham traveled to Łodź to dig up the valuables he had hidden before the war (of course this myth—whether it’s true or somewhat true or not at all true—existed here too) and returned with suitcases of food. This was the story behind the photograph of the fork sent to Yad Vashem as evidence—Abraham had brought this fork back with him from Łodź, Alexander told me, and Gertrud held on to it for the rest of her life. Abraham often stepped in with local authorities, using his newfound influence to help Gertrud and her family. He vouched for them. When the Soviets were confused by Opa’s World War I medallion on the wall and suspected he was a Nazi sympathizer, Abraham intervened. When
