Found and Lost Read online

  Alison Leslie Gold’s works include Anne Frank Remembered, written with Miep Gies, Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend, A Special Fate and Fiet’s Vase and Other Stories of Survival. Her non-fiction work has received numerous tributes including a Best of the Best Award, a Notable Book for a Global Society Award and a Christopher Award. She has also published fiction, including Clairvoyant and The Devil’s Mistress, the latter being nominated for a National Book Award. She divides her time between Manhattan, Hydra (Greece) and British Columbia.

  Alison Leslie Gold

  –

  FOUND AND LOST

  Mittens, Miep, and Shovelfuls of Dirt

  Contents

  – Prologue –

  – Part I: Lost and Found –

  – Interlogue I –

  – Part II: Gone but Not Forgotten –

  – Interlogue II –

  – Part III: Hungry Birds –

  – Interlogue III –

  – Part IV: Snow Goose Weathervane –

  – Interlogue IV –

  – Part V: A Curtain Blows into the Room –

  – Epilogue –

  – Characters and Correspondents –

  – Acknowledgments –

  – Prologue –

  Not long ago a dear friend died, and shortly after that an aged aunt. So began a series of deaths. I became unmoored, I was being left behind in a much altered world. These losses were happening against a backdrop of various events, large and small, faraway and near, to be remembered, negotiated, endured. (Even my own identity was erased at times, as a result of spending time with my aunt who was suffering from dementia.) In the midst of the reckoning came unexpected sources of strength, accommodation, even joy.

  These were not my first experiences of loss. Several decades before, I had lost most of myself. I was a woman seriously adrift, before I washed up on Anne Frank’s shore on what, coincidently, would have been Anne’s birthday – a cloudy June 12th in flower-filled Amsterdam. A life-altering encounter took place on that day with an aging couple, Miep and Jan Gies, who had risked their lives to protect Anne Frank and her family. This venerable couple had never been willing to step out of the shadows into the spotlight. I subsequently convinced them to do so, and the result became the book Anne Frank Remembered that would be translated far and wide.

  Having begun to peer into the murk of lost, partial, and often painful memory with Miep and Jan, I began collecting other untold or little-known stories, many but not all from World War II and the Shoah, at a time when the fact that witnesses were nearing their life’s end seemed to endanger these stories with forgetfulness. More fateful meetings ensued – with Claude Boule, Leo Bretholz, Zahava Bromberg, Dan Fante, Solly Ganor, Hannah Goslar, Marianne Christine Ihlen, Iakovos Kambanellis, Jane Mayhall, Padric McGarry, Irena Vrkljan Meyer-Wehlack and Benno Meyer-Wehlack, Jules Schelvis, Emilie Schindler, Yukiko Sugihara, Simon Wiesenthal, among others – resulting in further books, and a personal calling that continues to this day.

  During these subsequent excavations, I always kept my personal life apart from my writing. Until today.

  What I have ventured to do now is to gather fragments, materials, and letters to the living and the dead; letters to and from family, friends, friends of friends, strangers, associates, a translator, an editor, a lover. (I have occasionally used pseudonyms in order to protect an individual’s privacy.) All these bits and pieces spilled through my life and heart within the space of a few years.

  Yesterday, I came across the magnifying glass that allows me to peer into my micrographically reduced Oxford English Dictionary. As I have been moving between countries recently, like I did when I was younger (if for less desperate reasons now), and as I’ve been wondering in what form to write to the dead, the first word I chose to look up was ‘translate’. I was surprised to find, as its first definition: ‘To bear, convey, or remove from one person, place or condition to another; to transfer, transport … to remove the dead body or remains of a saint, or, by extension, a hero or great man, from one place to another.’ Although I’m not sure I would recognize a saint if I met one (I’ve met a few whom I consider heroes), and though I have been far too desultory in my learning of languages, in what I have been gathering here, it seems I too have been translating.

  Once, around the time when Miep and Jan and I were at work on what became our book, I asked Jan, who was almost ninety years old at the time, to comment on an event in the news. Jan shrugged and made a sweeping gesture with his arm that encompassed his living room and his then eighty-year-old wife Miep who was seated on the couch. ‘This is my world,’ he told me. ‘That other is not my world any more.’

  Though I’m much younger than he was at the time, what he meant is beginning to dawn on me.

  Part I

  – Lost and Found –

  DEAR DENNY,

  Hope the back is a little better each day: too much sitting at your desk, all that close editing, is not good for you. Please stop agonizing over semi-colons and hyphens and use the Spa Gift Pass before it’s out of date.

  I’m just back from the Greek island of Hydra where as you know I’ve owned a little fisherman’s cottage for the past almost forty years. Upon my return, I see that the situation with my Aunt Dorothy gets worse. Perhaps the end is coming. It hurts to look at her body, so diminished. Only her face, especially when she smiles, which she so radiantly does when I bring my face close to hers, is a source of uplift. For a brief moment I feel like a flying fish.

  While my aunt, aged ninety-three, is failing, Miep Gies, aged ninety-nine, is independent and clear- headed. Her centenary is approaching in a few months. My long-time friend on Hydra whom I’ve mentioned many times to you, Lily Mack, only in her eighties, died while I was in Greece. When I’d mentioned her, you asked me who she was. As I knew she was dying, I did not feel able to tell you. And now she is gone.

  She was the first child of White-Russian parents who fled the Revolution by travelling east, ending in Tehran where her father, Paul Mack (or Mak), painted miniatures for the Persian Shah. The exotically beautiful mother, Hélène, was never seen without a black silk scarf across the right eye socket. Several versions circulated about how she had lost her eye in the Revolution. Lily, her mother, and her brother Vladimir, were caught in Athens when the Italians attacked in October 1940. She worked with the Underground (though still only a teenager), giving clandestine assistance to a British airman who had been shot down over Greece and was on the run. She was caught, spent seventeen months in a prison cell adjacent to the area where executions by firing squad were conducted each day at dawn. The experience of listening to those daily executions, she always said, altered – ‘polluted’ – her being forever.

  We met in 1970 on my first trip to Greece. I had finished college, was already divorced, had my four-year-old son Thor with me when I arrived on the island of Hydra. I was to stay a month but stayed for two years. I’ve been visiting Hydra as often as I can for months at a time ever since then, and we remained trusted friends. It was an intense and complicated, sometimes very difficult, friendship over four decades, the likes of which I won’t have time to experience again.

  Yours,

  Alison

  DEAR LILY,

  Though you are gone, I find I need to continue to write to you as we have written, through letters sent or unsent, over these almost forty years. When Obama won the November election, I was awake until dawn, choked when the memory surfaced of my days at the University of North Carolina (at what was then called WC or Women’s College). This was a time (1962–63) when our own university ‘nigrahs’ (as they were known – there were nineteen that second year of integration) were not allowed to eat, drink, or go to the mov
ies off-campus with us whites. We picketed the Apple House coffee shop and the small movie theater called The Cinema; sang WE SHALL OVERCOME with lumps in our throats. At the time, almost every southern girl wore a wrap-around skirt, a paisley print blouse with a round collar, while I, almost a freak – the Yankee/Jew – wore sandals and a faux-Pucci dress that came in a can. We were warned by the police not to respond to anyone or anything no matter how menacing the taunt, for fear of inciting violence toward us – not even to the white women from the neighborhood who carried umbrellas to shield their delicate southern skin from the sun as they walked up to our picket line to spit in our faces.

  I’m sure I’ll write again soon.

  Your Alison

  Green garnet is gone from the ring, though the gold band remains on my finger. Stone must have fallen somewhere between the theater and the no.11 bus stop

  DEAR ALISON,

  I saw a notice that the aged poet Jane Mayhall whom you interviewed for your book Love In The Second Act passed away. Glad you got to interview her. Don’t laugh, but when it comes to the subjects who find themselves in your books, I can’t help but think of you as Mother Twitchett. As in:

  Old Mother Twitchett had but one eye,

  And a long tail which she let fly,

  And every time she went through a gap,

  A bit of her tail was left in the trap.

  In other words, you’re the needle, and your subjects are the thread. And, in that spirit, if you’re Mother Twitchett, I’m Simple Simon.

  Found an interesting new story for you to thread. Lolek Lau, an eight-year-old Jew, was in the same Buchenwald barracks as Feodor Mikhailichenko, a Russian prisoner of war, who stole potatoes to feed him, took a sweater from a corpse to make ear muffs for him, used his own body as a human shield to protect him from gunfire. At liberation Mikhailichenko tried to take Lau back to Rostov-on-Don in Russia but Lau had promised to look for his brother after the war. The connection was broken and they went their separate ways. Once Lau was older, he tried to locate Mikhailichenko, but failed. For sixty-three years there was not a clue until …

  More if I’ve enticed (and not offended) you by offering unsolicited urgings. Perhaps it’s a book? As both a friend and one of your translators, I encourage you not to give up on the Shoah while there are still stories to tell. As we Canadians never stop saying – Keep your stick on the ice!

  Simple Simon

  Discovered coins behind the sofa’s cushions. When I reach in to retrieve them, strands of minutes along with DNA in arabesques escape in a swarm

  DEAR LILY,

  Today when I shopped for Aunt Dorothy I threw in a jar of gefilte fish, something she once loved, when prepared by her illiterate immigrant mother. I showed her the jar, said, ‘I know you like gefilte fish.’ She contradicted me – ‘I don’t know what I like’ – then squinted at me, asked, ‘Are you Alison?’ ‘Yes. I’m Alison.’ ‘Are you sure?’ I told her I was sure. She has been the most left-wing member of my family, was never touchy-feely until dementia erased whatever had inhibited her. Now she kisses my hand many times when I visit. Today she said, ‘You get old and you get old and you get old.’ ‘That’s six kisses,’ I said. ‘Five,’ she corrected. She was right.

  Your Alison

  P.S. When I phoned to get the new shopping list from the aide from Ghana who looks after Aunt Dorothy, she told me, ‘Your aunt wants something to go with the fish balls you brought. A radish.’ ‘You mean horseradish sauce?’ ‘Yes, that must be it.’ Perhaps Dorothy has not forgotten everything after all. Gefilte fish is bland without strong horseradish sauce. The stronger the better. If it clears the sinus and brings tears it is good. I don’t know what you White-Russians ate, Lily, but we Russian Jews ate this fish that stank to high heaven while it was cooking. P.P.S. Last night I dreamt I married triplets.

  DEAR MR. NOWAK,

  Miep Gies, who rescued Anne Frank’s diary, will soon celebrate a significant birthday. She still lives in the Netherlands where her birthday will be a special event. A few of us who are close to her, including her son Paul, are trying to arrange a little surprise. Perhaps you, as archivist at YIVO Institute for Jewish Study, can help us with this.

  One night in 1942, two small children were dropped off with Miep and her husband in Amsterdam. It seems these children were separated from their parents, who had been arrested at the Central Station trying to flee. As it happened, Miep and Jan’s rented room was in the apartment belonging to the grandmother of these children. The grandmother was not at home at the time.

  Through Jan’s Underground connections, a hiding place was found for the girl, Clara Liezel Prinz, in Bilthoven, and a place found for the boy, Leon Maximilian Prinz, in Eemnes. It is known that Clara did not survive the war but that Leon did. However, his homecoming after the war was not reported. It is thought that, like many Jews who had lost most of their family, he may have left for the United States to start a new life.

  Here is what is known: Leon’s parents were Dutch Jews. Leon Maximilian Prinz was born on February 27th, 1937. His father was Lazar Baruch Prinz, a violinist, born Nov 7th, 1902. His mother was Perla Iri Prinz-Landau, born Jan 22nd, 1914. Neither parent survived the war.

  Our hope is to reunite Leon and Miep on the occasion of her birthday. So far we’ve had no luck on either side of the Atlantic. I spent hours at YIVO last week trying to use computer databases, could not make any headway.

  I’m told that you are a master researcher. If you can be of any help with this, we would be very, very grateful.

  Alison Leslie Gold

  DEAR LILY,

  I was at a reading at 192 Books on 10th Avenue. Across the room, I saw Natalie Wood alive and well, wearing a green suit.

  Our red-haired French friend Ruffe has contacted me out of the blue, wanting to know about that last day of ours and about your funeral. I remember him well from early Hydra days and had wondered what became of him. He was especially sweet to Thor; they swam together often. Have also heard from others who are in shock at the idea of living on without you. It’s awful that you have left us – left us without instructions.

  Love now and always,

  Alison

  HEI ALISON,

  When we spoke at the recent writer’s festival in Oslo, you mentioned the death of your cat ten years ago, how it set off a depression in you that lasted two years.

  What I’m about to tell you I’ve never shared before with anyone. My son died of an overdose. We had eaten our hearts out over him for almost twenty years as his addiction ran its awful course. The same week we got the news that he had died, my pet brown rabbit Sigrid died.

  Frankly I was in more pain over my rabbit.

  Oystein

  DEAR RUFFE,

  Be a little patient with me. I have received your many urgent requests and I promise to tell you about Lily’s last day very soon.

  Alison

  A bottle of strong Düsseldorf mustard arrived by mail, sent by friends

  DEAR RUFFE,

  Lily hadn’t been to Hydra for two years. She’d been holed up at the family’s Athens apartment. She was out of the hospital ten days when I arrived on September 28th. ‘I was born in a warm place,’ she told me: ‘Tehran. My children and husband want me to go to England, for better medical services, but I don’t like the cold. I don’t like the Anglo Saxon.’

  Lily’s emphysema had progressed to the point where now she was tethered to a large oxygen tank. The tumor in her breast that she had refused to have treated had metastasized and was now inoperable. (Once, she took my hand and put it on what then felt like an asparagus tip.) ‘Maybe I’m eighty-five,’ she told me, ‘or ninety. I’ve lost count.’ She wasn’t kidding: she had often falsified her age upward as well as downward through her life when it suited her.

  Rather than rush from Athens airport to Hydra, and because she had said ‘Hurry’ when I had spoken with her on the phone, I’d made a hotel reservation in Athens. In the morning, I stole a bag full of break
fast foods from the hotel dining room to bring with me. Like I’d done in the past, I spent the entire day with Lily. Arrived at 9:30, left at 7:30 in the evening.

  In the course of the day we ate spinach pies, halvah, slices of marble cake, hard-boiled eggs, toast, bacon, croissants, rolls, jam, butter, cheese, salami. We ate like horses. I’d also picked up a loaf of bread and a string of garlic from the market. During our day together she wrote letters of farewell to her granddaughters, taped a message of farewell for my son, referring to him as her ‘third child’, found several £20 notes in a copy book and gave one to me for my son.

  She summoned me to the bathroom. I came. She was naked, standing, stretching without the help of the oxygen tank.

  I will send this now and continue when I’m less jittery.

  Alison

  MS. GOLD,

  Any records we have of immigrant arrivals in the U.S. are to be found in our Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) collection (Record Group 245). I looked through the index cards of the case files, but did not find a Leon Prinz born in the 1930s. This may just mean that HIAS did not assist Leon in coming to the U.S. You can look for general U.S. arrivals in the Ellis Island website of the U.S. Immigration Service.

  What is the date of your celebration?

  Aleksy Nowak

  YIVO Archivist

  Premonition. A swarm of bees will fly into the room. My anaphylactic injector will be out of date

  DEAR RUFFE,

  As in the past, we took naps in the afternoon; Lily slept in her chair beside the oxygen tank. The house was knee-deep in clutter: treasures to Lily, garbage to others. Because there had been an infestation of giant cockroaches, I had refused to sleep over or even nap in recent years, but not that day, so for an hour or two all was silent.