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

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    Rose smiled slightly at the old memory. “To this day I don’t know why exactly I responded as I did, though I think that guilt, that psychological cancer that had been growing in me since I spit on my father, finally took over. I screamed in his face, ‘ No. I AM a Jew. ’
    â€œThe others in the group stood there stunned. Then one at a time, they turned their backs on me until only the man I had slapped and the terrified family was left. He said, ‘ I should have known. I could smell it in you. If I were you, I’d leave this place. You have lied to us and we won’t forget it. ’ ”
    Rose had gone home to the Stanislaws and told them what she had done. They decided that it was not safe for her to continue living there. “In truth, it wasn’t safe for them for me to continue living there,” she told the congregation. “I was a reminder that they had been lying to their neighbors and a reminder of the not-too-distant past when they’d looked the other way when my real family and so many others were murdered. They bribed some government official to let me leave the country on a student visa and sent me to New York.”
    Smiling, she added, “It was the best thing that ever happened to me.” She’d been living in the city several years after her arrival when she read a notice in the newspaper that there was to be a reunion of Sobibor survivors.
    â€œI was now a young woman and had never forgotten the look on my father’s face, or the sound of his voice, when I rejected him and called him a dirty Jew,” she said. “So I went to the reunion hoping against hope that he would turn up there. I imagined a joyous reunion where I would tell him how sorry I was for my words as a child, and how grateful I was for the sacrifices he and my mother made that kept me alive. And he would forgive me and we would be a family.”
    Shmuel Kuratowski did not appear that day. “However, I met someone who had known my father at Sobibor. His name was Simon Lubinsky, the kindest, gentlest, wisest man I have ever known.”
    Rose said she’d never told anybody about how she’d treated her father out of shame. “But I felt I could confide in Simon,” she said. “So I told him the story I just told all of you and waited for him to pass judgment. It was the longest few seconds of my life, and you know what he said?” She stopped to look lovingly at her husband. “He said, ‘ You were one of God’s angels whom he assigned to bear witness to this colossal outrage. God gave you the strength that someday you would remind us all of the tyranny that exists when people lack virtue and absent themselves from God. ’ Six months later, he proposed to me and I was thrilled to say yes.”
    The couple had returned to Poland in 1980 and located the Stanislaw farm only to find out that Piotr had died. But Anka was still alive and sharp despite her years, filling in some of the gaps of Rose’s knowledge about her childhood.
    â€œShe said they never heard from my father again after that day but suggested we go to Lublin to see if anyone would remember a man named Shmuel Kuratowski,” Rose said. “We succeeded in finding one man, Stefan, who had been a child when my father returned from the camps and rented a small flat in the attic of his family’s home.
    â€œApparently, my father lived by doing odd jobs but seemed to Stefan to be a sad and lonely man who never remarried. Nor did he talk much about his family from before the war, except to say that he had a beautiful daughter who had survived the Nazis and then moved to America, where she lived like a princess in a fairy tale.
    â€œStefan said that he asked him once why he did not go to America to live with his beautiful daughter, and my father replied, ‘What? Me? A brudny Zid? Whatever would she do with me in America?’ They never