Read Online Trap (9781476793177) by Robert K. Tanenbaum - Free Book Online Page A

without teeth . . . and called me by a name I had all but forgotten. ‘Rose,’ he said.
    â€œI ran behind Piotr’s back and begged him to tell the man to go away. The stranger stood up and I could see the pain on his face, but he tried again, stretching out his hands to me. ‘Rose, I am your father.’ ”
    As she spoke, Rose held her arms out in memory of a gesture from long ago. “I remember screaming out of fear and because, I think, I knew that what he said was true.”
    The child had looked at the man and woman with whom she had lived for the past four years and Piotr nodded. “He said it was true, the dirty scarecrow was my ojciec , my father. My reaction was to scream, ‘But he’s a brudny Zid, a filthy Jew!’  ”
    Rose shook her head sadly. “I refused to let him near me. At one point he got down on his knees and begged me to let him hold me. ‘You are all I have left,’ he begged. But when Piotr brought me over to him, I spit in his face.”
    At last the scarecrow who was her father stopped trying and covered his face with his hands. “He let out a sob that was the saddest and loneliest sound I have ever heard. For a moment, I felt sorry for him, but not enough to go to him. And finally Piotr told him, ‘Maybe you should leave, and you can try again some other day.’ And so my father, Shmuel Kuratowski, the man who made me my first and only dreidel, who saved every last cent he could so that he and my mother could buy my safety, turned and walked away. . . . I would never see him again.”
    Rose stopped speaking, too overcome for the moment, and looked out at her audience. Everywhere heads were bowed and tears streamed down cheeks; there were sniffles and coughs and sobs, but no one moved or spoke. However, she was not through with her story.
    â€œIf anything after that encounter I became even more anti-Semitic,” she said. “I joined Polish nationalist youth groups where Jews were not welcome and indeed, reviled. I hid my secret ethnicity with such fervor that no one hated Jews as much as I did.”
    Rose stopped for a moment and looked up at the ceiling of the synagogue. “I turned my back on the God of Israel and threw myself into Catholicism. But the more I rejected my Jewishness, the more the guilt grew in me like a cancer. I could rail against Jews during the day, but in my sleep I saw the devastated face of my father and heard him say, ‘ You are all I have left.’ Then one day, I was attending a youth rally in the town park when a young Jewish couple and their daughter had the unfortunate luck of wandering into our midst. They were Orthodox and easy to recognize; he in the broad-brimmed black hat and full beard, her in a modest dress with a floral print. The fascists who were in control of our group set upon them, beating the man senseless and tearing the clothes off of his wife and knocking her to the ground.”
    Closing her eyes as she remembered the scene, Rose shook her head. “At first I did nothing. After all, these were brudny Zid . They deserved whatever they got. They’d killed Christ. They were responsible for Godless communism. They made human sacrifices of Christian infants. Nothing was too outlandish to lay at their feet. But then I saw the little girl. She had been standing off to the side crying until her mother was knocked to the ground. That’s when she ran forward and threw herself on that poor woman. I realized that she couldn’t have been much older than I was when my parents, my real parents, gave me to the Stanislaws for safekeeping. One of the thugs grabbed her by her hair and pulled her up; I thought he was going to strike her or worse. Then something snapped in me. I ran forward and slapped him as hard as I could. Surprised, he dropped the little girl.
    â€œHe yelled at me, ‘ Why did you do that? Are you a Jew lover?