Dear Ted
You are long gone now.
I came to see you in Manchester
Connecticut
when you were 90
and I was 50.
I asked you about your uncles in France.
What happened to them?
You didn’t know any more than
what my father (your cousin) told me:
Their names, their work
that they were in France at the beginning
of the war
Not there at the end.
Nothing else. Nothing more, you said.
Your sister came over
and we talked.
She said how she used to write to the French uncles
when she was a girl.
But she didn’t have the letters.
She remembered the name of a road.
But that was all.
I came to see you when you were a 100
and I was 60.
We talked.
This time you told me that my father
(your cousin)
had a half-brother,
You knew my father’s father
but my father didn’t know him.
Yes, you said, my father’s father
had an ‘illegitimate child’.
But the French uncles?
Nothing.
Then your ex-wife’s brother died.
Amongst his papers were four letters.
They had been sent to your father.
They must have passed from your father
to you, to your ex-wife, to her brother.
Did you not remember these letters, Ted?
Two of them told of the plight of your uncles
In France. My father’s and your uncles.
Two of them told of the plight of your aunts
(my father’s aunts)
And your cousin
(my father’s cousin)
In Poland.
Did you not remember those letters, Ted?
I found out that your French uncles
and aunts
were deported to Auschwitz
and never came back.
One Polish cousin (my father’s cousin)
survived.
As I write this, he’s 97
in a Jewish Care Home
just down the road from here
in North London.
I visited him.
He mixed English with Polish
with Yiddish.
He thought he was in trouble.
And he thought that someone
had taken his things.
He lives in his own little world
his son told me the other day.
Then you and your wife Gladys died.
Your son, went into the room where
you and I talked about these things.
The room where you said that
you knew nothing more.
There was a locked closet
He opened it.
Inside was a sealed box,
Marked ‘family photos’.
He opened it.
Inside were black and white photos
going back to a time before the First World War.
Pictures of the French uncles
Pictures of the Polish aunts
and your cousin.
On the backs there were messages
to your father.
Pictures of your French uncles’ wives.
One of the French uncles was in uniform
On the back it showed that he was
in a German regiment.
I remembered you or my father
telling the story of how the two uncles
fought on opposite sides in the First World War.
They could have killed each other.
Then,
later I found out that one of them
was the best man at the other’s wedding.
All this.
You couldn’t tell me or your son
about the photos.
Even as we sat a few feet away from them
you couldn’t open the closet and get them out.
But you didn’t destroy them.
You left them there for us to find.
Why did you do these things, Ted?
Why couldn’t you tell us they were there?
And one more thing:
I found out that your sister
tried to get one of the French uncles
out of France and get him to the US.
Why didn’t she tell me this?
Perhaps you knew about this.
If so, why didn’t you tell me?
