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Change Your Life! |
Life: Just like a sentimental movie |
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August 18, 2000
JERUSALEM (AP) - "Have you any brothers?" the caller asked. "Four," Lazar Sheiman remembered answering. "They are dead." "What were their names?" the caller pressed. "Haim, Nehamia, ..." "What about Leibisch?" asked the caller. "Leibisch is dead," Lazar said. "No, Lazar," Leibisch said. "I never died. I'm alive." Their similarities are immediately apparent: the same reserved gestures, the same tight smile, the same courtly ways of a central European upbringing. What divides the brothers is the six decades each was convinced the other was dead. Lazar, 78, and Leonid, 79 - Leibisch in his youth - were reunited through a program run by Israel's Holocaust memorial that tracks down survivors of the ravages of World War II. They met at Yad Vashem on Wednesday, only the third time they have met since Leonid made the call last month. Such reunions are very rare, Yad Vashem spokeswoman Lisa Davidson said. In the last 15 years, there have been only about four cases of siblings who survived the Holocaust finding each other and perhaps 100 instances in which cousins were reunited, she said. The brothers last saw each other in their hometown of Tomaszow in 1941, as the German army advanced on Soviet-occupied Poland. The Red Army snapped up Leonid, who was draft age, and Lazar was recruited into the "youth groups" deployed on work detail throughout the Soviet Union. After the war, Lazar returned to Poland and Leonid was forced to settle in Ukraine, where he worked in construction. Each tried hard to track down his family. The Communist authorities were not helpful; Lazar remembered being informed that an uncle was dead, only to find him alive and well a few years later in a town just a day's journey away. Lazar heard from distant relatives that most of his immediate family had been wiped out by the Nazis and their allies in the Holocaust. Leonid learned nothing. Soon each brother became convinced he was the sole survivor of a brood of five boys and a girl. "I was sure there was no one," Lazar said. He immigrated to Israel in 1957 to start a new life. The longing for family would not leave him, and in the 1990s, at the beginning of a wave of immigration from the collapsed Soviet Union, his Israeli-born wife started asking around on his behalf. "I would overhear the name `Sheiman,' and I would buttonhole people and ask them where they were from," Orit Sheiman said. In 1991, on a day excursion to Jerusalem, she made Lazar stop by at Yad Vashem and register his family's names. Leonid arrived here in 1995, but it was not until his daughter, Alla, arrived this year that he turned to Yad Vashem - she heard of the program in a Hebrew language class and urged him to write a letter. A Yad Vashem employee uncovered Lazar's information sheet, recorded in a small, precise hand: "Mother, Raizel, died in war; father, Shlomo, died in war; brother, Leibisch, died in war." She called Leonid, and he waited a week - refusing to believe he had found a brother, believing it was a gruesome coincidence. Finally, he made the call. "The brothers say they're nothing alike," Orit said, "but the kids notice the gestures, the expressions." They sit and occasionally stare at each other, disbelieving; they share the same tight smile as their mother bears in a photograph Leonid carried for decades. "I thought this picture was all that remained of our family," he said. "You look more like mother," Lazar interjected. Each crosses his right arm over his waist when relaxing. When a visitor enters a room, they stand up at once and bow slightly, a habit otherwise notable for its utter absence in Israel's informal society. They speak in Russian - "Leonid has forgotten his Yiddish, which is a shame," Lazar laments - and remember walking to synagogue on Saturdays, each grabbing one of their father's hands, and torturing the rabbi at religions class with pranks. They recall playing hooky at the river on a hot day, and fleeing a bombing raid together. In private, a while later, Lazar regrets how his brother has internalized the "Russian mentality." Lazar has invested well and lives a comfortable retirement in the upscale Tel Aviv suburb of Herzliya; Leonid is happy with his dlrs 500 monthly pension in the drab desert town of Kiryat Gat. "He says he `makes do'," Lazar said, raising his eyebrows. Brothers are brothers, however, and Lazar said he intends on making up for lost time. "The circle is closed." |
