Chapter One

Fifty-three years after our deportation, Manfred and I went back. The specific reason was that the year before a family wedding deeply connected to the war years had stimulated travel conversations between us: Prague? Berlin? Maybe even Hamburg and ...?

By then we had multiplied and had buried our closest. Pappi died in 1962, felled by a heart attack at age sixty-four, too young to be pressed by his five grandchildren with difficult questions about his past. Manny phoned with the news at 2 a.m. By 10 A.M. we were exiting the Delancey Street subway station on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where Shimen Korman, a second cousin, was waiting at the head of the stairs. Manny had called him and he, in turn, had insisted we meet him before going to the funeral parlor. After a long embrace, he gave us instructions that were brief but to the point: "Don't let him sell you expensive boxes. Tell him you want a simple pine box. Simple. Nothing fancy. A simple pine box. That's what Social Security covers and that is all you need." Then he went on his way to make all sorts of other arrangements; for it was Friday and Pappi had to be buried quickly, out in Queens, so that the Sabbath observers like Shimen could go to the cemetery and come back before sundown. Some old friends had come with their World War II memories of days shared in Holland's Westerbork, but there had not been time for anything but a small family gathering. A few cars traveled to Queens, and there, after the last ritual, we buried Pappi amid his kinfolk.

Mutti died twenty-one years later, struck down by a stroke. Without ever having forgotten Jerusalem, her righ

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