I mention this because I desperately want to do justice to Erik as the complex human being that I came to know, especially because it was he who gave me back a reason to live. But I must admit that the how of his reappearance among the living is no longer very important to me. Now that we know the full scope of the Nazi genocide – that the Germans almost succeeded in annihilating us – it’s only the why of his return that I still speculate about.
And, of course, I still wonder about the people whom he describes in The
Warsaw Anagrams.
It was Dawid Engal, the superintendent of the building where Erik lived in the ghetto, who was able to tell me what happened to several of them. In the Before Time, he had been a professor of Polish literature at the University of Warsaw, and a colleague of his there was able to tell me that he emigrated to Brooklyn just after the war and found employment as a German teacher at Lafayette High School. We began corresponding during the summer of 1949.
Engal confirmed to me that Mikael Tengmann had indeed been killed shortly after Erik and Izzy’s escape from the ghetto. He told me that the physician’s body had been discarded one evening outside the front door of the Nozyk Synagogue. The rumour that Engal had heard was that bruises on Tengmann’s neck indicated that he had been strangled.
In response to my questions about Erik’s friends and neighbours, the professor added that the bakery in the courtyard where Ewa worked was shut down by the Nazis in July 1942. Shortly after that, Ziv purchased a pistol on the black market and joined the Jewish Combat Organization, telling everyone he would never permit the Germans to catch him alive. I have since discovered that, along with most of the members of that fighting force, he very likely died in the Ghetto Uprising, which began in January of 1943.
