Trafika Europe 12 - French Bon-Bons

A Souvenir from New York

be against it.” I’ve been telling you my life story, Mr. Baskin, but I didn’t tell you how we came here. We were among the first here. We arrived when the only way to get here was through Vienna... Soon after the first families started leaving, we got a letter from America. My Galya was so afraid to open it, she was waiting for me to come back from work. And who do you think the letter was from? If I tell you, you won’t believe it. It was from my older brother, Lazar. He found me after so many years! It turns out that someone from Krasnopole met him in New York, and he learned that I was alive! I read his letter and wept. And my wife wept, and my mom Akulina--everyone wept. It turned out that he had been captured during the war. He survived by impersonating a Russian. Just like the rest of my family, he does not look like a Jew. He went through the camps--the worst of them: Treblinka, Majdanek. He managed to run away. And then a German lady farmer near Munich hid him for two years. When the war ended, he was too scared to go back to Krasnopole, so he went to America with his Greta, the lady farmer. “So many years passed, and I still dream of Krasnopole at night. And of my father’s house. And of you, Haim. I remember you as a baby, and that’s how I still dream of you,” he wrote. “I’m getting old and sick, I’m in and out

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