AGATHA

AGATHA

Ela, my dearest daughter.
I will no longer be in this world when you read this letter. I don't know if you'll read it because I am not sure I'll leave it to the notary guy.
Dearest Ela. You have always been our support and our pride. Similar to your elder son, Tot. When he got a professorship at the university, you wondered why Mother and I were giggling. It was funny that it was that university. But we decided that the professor could no longer be called Tot, but only by his name.
You have probably been surprised when Grandfather and Grandmother died, and this house was ceded not to Mother or me but to you.
I know you have always had clashes with Mother, but she told Grandpa that it would be all right only in this way.
Now, this entire property is yours. As it always was. Even more, than you can imagine.
Grandfather got it from the Gaul family when they got an order to move into the ghetto. With all notary papers.
Grandfather and Grandmother forbade us, and Mother used to say not to wake the wolf. Because what happened cannot be undone.
When the Gauls relative came here a few years ago, we gave him only the mezuzah, which was once placed on the Gaul's door. But we didn't say anything else.
I even went to Father Musial, who baptized you, to confess.
But he said that it is a matter between me and God.
But when Mother died, I made a decision.
You always knew that my sister, Agatha, who was shot by mistake during the occupation, was your mother. This we have never hidden from you. We have raised you, and you have always been our beloved daughter.
Even if Mother was hard for you, it was only because of the grief.
I would like to tell you about Agatha, your mother.
She was always a little weird. She had only one friend at school. The Gaul's daughter, Gena. They were such close friends that either Gena slept at our place or Agatha spent all the time with Gena at the Gaul's home. We were even mad at her because she began to speak Jewish to us.
The Gauls were not very religious.
They kept their holidays and the Sabbath, but without any exaggeration. They treated Agatha like she was their second daughter. All neighbors were puzzled by the situation and said that Agatha was probably some changeling.
The girls finished school, and Gena married just before the Germans came.
When the Gaul family moved into the ghetto, it wasn't so severe, to begin with, and Agatha often visited Gena there. Gena came to visit us too, but it stopped when she got pregnant. Then it got worse because they stopped issuing the passes from the ghetto. Gena was sent to some work just after she gave birth to the baby. She was still weak after that, and because of that, the Gestapo man beat her unconscious. She was brought almost dead home, and the baby was unattended because the Germans had already taken the old Gauls away. When Agatha slipped into the ghetto, she took the child to our place.
We had this baby for almost six months when it happened. Gena didn't get better, and she asked Agatha to see her child for the last time. Agatha, that stupid girl, agreed. She went into the ghetto with Gena's child. When Agatha was passing the hole in the wall on her way from the ghetto, the patrol spotted her. I got it to know because Gena's husband, who followed her out, had somehow sent us a letter from the ghetto. The policemen thought it was a Jewish woman, who wanted to escape from the ghetto, and they just shot her.
Poor girl did not die right away. When one of the policemen approached her, she told him that if he had God in his heart, he had to deliver her child to us.
And he came with this child and left immediately.
This child was you. That's why we could never tell you who your father was.
After this letter, we have not heard anything from him or Gena.
And the ghetto was emptied of people. They probably took them to the Treblinka concentration camp. Only some corpses remained there.
Ela, my love. This is how I settled my account with God.
May God protect you.
Your loving father. John.

Alex Wieseltier
April 2020