JFK Airport

JFK Airport functions in the novel as the threshold between the buried past of the Kovno Ghetto and the present-day quest for justice—a liminal space where a homemade wooden chest, hammered together with big heavy nails and metallic corner pieces, becomes the physical vessel of an entire community's testimony. The airport is not merely a transit point but the stage for the archive's dramatic unsealing, the moment when the history that Josef Barbanel wrote in secret, in a neat Yiddish script like stitches sewn into the page, finally surfaces into the light of a customs inspection room. It is the place where the novel's central act of recovery—the retrieval of the ghetto diary and its reams of documentation—reaches its formal, legal, and emotional culmination.

The Impoundment and the Legal Stakes

The chest arrives at JFK under conditions of legal suspicion: it is impounded until, at Pem's request, he can arrange for an attorney from the United States Department of Justice to be present when it is cracked open, as customs has insisted it must be. The stakes are explicit and procedural—if the archive includes documentary proof of the identity of the ghetto commander, S.S. Major Schmitz, it will have to resist a challenge in court, and so the circumstances of the unsealing have to be irreproachable. The arrangements take the better part of two weeks, and on the appointed day Pem and Sarah ride out to JFK in a taxi on a late weekday morning in the rain. They do not speak. Sarah uses her cell phone to remind her helper, Angelina, that the boys have half a day of school because of a teachers' conference and will have to be picked up at lunchtime—a mundane domestic thread running alongside the gravity of what they are about to witness. Pem, whose new triumphalist self-regard is on this morning absent, finds himself reading the color-coded directions along the airport highway through the rain streaks, and rising behind his eyes is the old familiar bleakness. He wonders about his own motives, whether he is incapable of an act that does not contain its own corruption, whether this could have been at heart no more than a seductive stunt—he had flown into Moscow, made calls, spoken as a priest to the fathers, a diplomat to the attachés, a con man to the hustlers, flashed his roll, laid on a lot of attitude, and fearlessly penetrated the KGB.

The Unsealing of the Chest

Minutes later, in a small office in the International Arrivals Building, Sarah, Pem, a young woman from the U.S. Attorney's office in New York, and various customs people watch as an inspector takes up a hammer and chisel and goes to work. The chest sits on a steel table. It is larger than Sarah understood from Pem's description—she had imagined it as the size of a footlocker, but it is larger, deeper. It looks homemade, hammered together with big heavy nails and metallic corner pieces, painted white, but where the paint has flaked off there is raw lumber. The customs man finds the rusted locks impervious and asks if he can pry off the hasps, which, he warns, will splinter the wood. Without quite realizing the proprietorship she has been granted, Sarah nods her approval. Yet the sound of the splitting wood makes her wince—as if her father's history is seeping into the room. The hasps are pried off and the thick rope is cut. The attorney takes a small camera out of her bag and snaps three, four pictures of the Russian writing across the top of the chest. Then the inspectors move forward, carefully lifting out packages of various sizes wrapped in oilskin. There is in addition an oilskin lining against the inner sides of the chest—the fierce preservation of these materials is unmistakable and, to Sarah, itself an urgent message that brings a sob to her throat.

The Contents Revealed

The inspectors unwrap the packages to find sheaves of paper bound in twine, booklets, manuals, folders, rolled-up blueprints, diagrams, stapled documents, envelopes of various sizes, each labeled in a small, neat Yiddish script. They open every packet, every envelope. Then, having run their hands along the inner walls of the chest, they agree among themselves that there is nothing here of interest to them. They replace everything, more or less as they found it, and excuse themselves. Pem and the attorney dive in. In notebooks, students' bluebooks, and unbound pages, they find a diary in one increasingly familiar hand covering a period of three years, 1941 to the date in 1944 when the ghetto is dismantled and the survivors are marched to the railroad station. And reams of documentation: rules and regulations issued by the Germans, innumerable orders with the signature of Commandant Schmitz, confiscating all domestic animals, then all wagons. The archive is the materialization of Barbanel's lifelong act of witness—the diary in which he reported everything that happened, along with the relevant documentation, the latest regulations, the execution orders, the deaths, minutes of the council meetings, orders signed by the infamous Commandant Schmitz, proscriptions, dicta, identity papers for the work details—every imaginable item went into this history of his. He had used whatever paper he had on hand, unused student exercise books, for example, writing in a neat Yiddish, the characters very small, the words flying off his pen line after line in his passion to say what happened each day, each moment, of their lives as captives.

Sarah's Encounter with Her Father's Testimony

Sarah has in her hands typed lists of those who have died in the ghetto and also those who were taken from the ghetto and never again seen. Each name has a date and place of birth next to it. Not infrequently, the names of entire families are listed. There is no time or distance in Sarah's apprehension of these pages—they are not historical but, in their simple exact notation, a curve of the universe's light flashing through her, lasing her consciousness into these leaves of paper, letter by letter, as if the newly dead are being written down as she reads, with the thunderings of jets and the drone of passing traffic in her ears. And now Pem hands her an envelope of forbidden little black-and-white photos: a line of men and women marching to work behind barbed wire; a husband and wife and their child on a bench having their picture taken, the cloth stars sewn to their coats; simple pictures, calm, expressionless faces; a woman on her knees in the vegetable garden; the members of the council posing in business suits with stars; a body in a business suit hanging from a gallows, the head, awry, staring heavenward; winter, snow on the ground; and here, seven little boys in front of a wood cabin, standing at their idea of attention on the steps, wearing military-school caps and stars on their breasts that might possibly be imagined as insignia of their office as runners for the council—unsmiling little boys, one with shoulders hunched up in the instinctive posture of self-protection, or perhaps he is cold, all underdressed, with short pants and sweaters and jackets they have outgrown, but each of them at attention, feet together, arms pressed against his sides, looking into the camera in the full knowledge of death. Sarah finds her father in the first row.

The Aftermath and the Failure of Justice

The unsealing at JFK is meant to be the decisive legal moment—the archive that could prove the identity of the ghetto commander, S.S. Major Schmitz, and force him to stand up in court and let the world take a look at him for what he was. The documentary trail had been long and frustrating: the rabbi had faxed Sarah's father's file, with his letters to the Justice Department, their bureaucratic replies, two 1977 articles from the Times about a deportation hearing and a finding, a blurry head shot of a bald fellow with a sickly thin face. Three people testified that the man in question was the ghetto commandant, Schmitz, but his lawyer shot down their testimony—they were elderly, easily befuddled. The defendant testified he was Helmut Preissen, an ex-corporal who only did guard duty in the ghetto for three months before he was shipped to fight on the Russian front, the same ID he presented to the immigration authorities after the war. The judge found in his favor. Letters to and from the Simon Wiesenthal Center agreed that Preissen was almost certainly Schmitz, but short of convincing documentation, the ID could not be made that would justify reopening the case. The archive recovered at JFK was the last hope. Yet the novel's final word on the matter comes later, when Pem reports: "We found out yesterday the son of a bitch died two months ago." Schmid, Schmitz, whatever his name was—the Nazi who ran the ghetto died in his sleep, in a home in Yonkers. "We had him good and nailed, too. Damn!" The airport, the site of the archive's triumphant recovery, thus becomes the hinge of an irony: the evidence that could have brought Schmitz to justice was secured, but the man himself slipped away, never having to stand up in court and let the world take a look at him for what he was. The chest's unsealing at JFK stands as the novel's most concrete victory over erasure—the moment the buried testimony of the Kovno Ghetto was restored to the world—even as it underscores the limits of that victory in the face of death's own evasion of justice.