Sacel 2000
by Shelley Berc
photos by Alejandro Fogel

For years we've been planning to go. For years, the little village was circled in red on our specially ordered map of Transylvania. And finally due to chance we were teaching in Eastern Hungary, only 400 kilometers away from the circled dust spot on our map. Today finally, after years of hearing the name whenever Moishe talked of his childhood, we traveled to the village of Sacel in the Transylvanian part of what is now Rumania where my husband Alejandro's father was born and from which he fled when word came in 1941 that they were rounding up all the young Jewish men for labor camps. His life changed forever then, he changed out of his Hassidic clothes and gave up his expectation of becoming a rabbi and never returned to Sacel again, never saw his mother and father or eight of his twelve brothers and sisters again. We wanted to see that place where he lived before his whole world came apart and spun out in ways that made Alejandro's life possible--a Buenos Aires porteno with nostalgia for the Incan civilization of the Andes and no ties whatsoever to the ultra orthodox world of his ancestors in Eastern Europe.

Alejandro's curiosity about his roots is constricted to his father's side of the family--Hassidic Jews from the province of Maramures, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. I have always wondered why he wasn't very inquisitive about his mother's side--also Jewish and also from present day Rumania but on the other side of the Carpathians. Perhaps it is because he knew that part of that family in Buenos Aires where his maternal grandparents had immigrated in 1910 and where he was born in 1955 and where he lived until he married me. He knows none of his Fogel relatives well--none of the hundreds of cousins who now flourish in Bnai Brak and Me'a Shaarim in Israel and none of course of the other hundreds who perished in the Holocaust. I think it's these ones who tie him to his father's memories more than his mother's, the dead who haunt him, who want him to know them, ghosts who follow him, whispering so he can barely hear his unknown family's past. I see them sometimes in his sleep as he tosses back and forth in nightmares which he never remembers the next day. And so, they have started to haunt me as well.

We have arrived in Sacel and climb out of our sparkling white Hungarian van with its skeptical driver(why would tourists drive five hours from civilized Eastern Hungary to come to this hole?). Sacel 2000 is a town that time really has passed by. There is no running water, electricity works only a few hours a day, there are barely any cars, the houses and clothing seem straight out of a fairy tale, and the people eke out livings working their small patches of land, making just enough to survive. We stand by the side of the road looking around in that particular daze of people who have arrived at the point of their mission and haven't considered what they would do once they got there. What do we do now after all these years that we are finally here in Sacel? His father's Sacel. We keep digging at the earth on the side of the road with our sandals but we can't dig it up-that past and that place which is here but to us invisible. Or is it totally obliterated I am wondering--not that we are unable to see but that there is nothing left to see--it is irrevocably gone and anything we try to envision to bring it back is just a kind of Disneyland. I can't get out of my head the model village of old time Transylvania that I saw some years ago in the heart of broken down Bucharest. It was pretty and quaint and spotlessly clean but I couldn't imagine people living there. But people do live here in Sacel--five hundred of them with their cows, their horses, their chickens, their dreams and their past. And somehow, this real place is not so charming as the miniature village plopped down in Bucharest--this one saddens me immediately with its poverty and its lostness in time.

I turn my eyes to the mountains that leap up from the edge of town. The Carpathians--high, dark-heavy forests separated by patches of bright green meadow. They are certainly the same as what Alejandro's father saw in the 1920s when he was a boy. And for a moment we can share that exact vision with the child who was to become Alejandro's father. But only for the briefest moment and then the confusion, the aloofness of time grabs hold of us again and it is just another mountain, another forest, not his mountain, not his forest. It surprises me to see such a wild, unscalped forest in Europe. Trees so tall and luxuriant, ravines so deep that it's a joy to imagine myself tumbling down them into the ends of myself, a being who could have prayed to the nature gods in a pre-Christian-Judaic world--an animist who listened to each wind and river sound for a sign of how to go forward in life. These forests are full of numen animated by the sun that reaches in to impregnate the dark growth and the wind that moves the seed to burst and the soil that holds tight to the fallen rain until life is ready to rise. These forests tilt down down down from a great height into the depths of the earth-- this land belched up from the explosion of volcanic gods from the planet's core and so formed of elemental upheaval and fury. You could tumble down fatally into these vast ravines, soft with fresh pine needles and last year's crumbled leaves and sink into the soil of the center of the earth and grow up like a weed in this forest, pushing up, fighting for light as everything must here to survive or fall back to compost and decay for more tenacious organisms to feed on. I think how spoiled I am--how adapted to air conditioning, electric light, hot and cold running water, food from the supermarket and it is very clear: I 'd never survive in these beautiful woods. I think of Alejandro's father growing up at the foot of these Carpathians--being a small boy here and wondering how high the trees could grow and how far the sky went and if you could really climb to the moon from the tip of the highest peak and vowing to do it someday when he had finished all his Torah studies.

But that world of Jews and Torah, small synagogues, unheated study houses, kosher butcher shops is gone. Sixty years later there are no Jews here and when you mention them people get a puzzled look on their faces like 'what's that' or wax nostalgic the way we white Americans do over Native Americans since we made them nearly extinct. When a people are obliterated their image changes to the descendants of their killers--they become romantic figures straight out of fairy tales as if they never really lived at all. But they did, I keep reminding myself, they did. When the Jews were driven out (literally in wagon carts) for deportation, the peasants from the outskirts of the village came and took their houses and land--some of them who were children and teenagers then are still here. (Moishe said his brother Joseph Schmiel had gone back after the war to find their house destroyed and local peasants threatening to kill him. He left the same day.) We target the oldest people we see sitting on the rough stone ledges that line Sacel's road and separate the private homes from the public space and through our friend and interpreter Gellert, we ask them: "did you know the family Fogel, did you know Zvi Fogel, did you know Dreisa Fogel?" We forage our brains for the names of all the dead children some of whom even Alejandro's father has forgotten. No one remembers. They would have been children and teenagers then and people's last names are something that wouldn't be a primary thing to keep in mind--and we have so little else to jog memory--a kosher meat killer, a poor family, red haired father, 13 children, tallis, ear locks. But they don't remember. One of the old men sitting by the road offers: "I was thirteen when the Jews "left" (his word for it) and I had to take a load of them in my horse cart to Viseul de Sus to the train station" (where they would board the sealed cars to Poland and Auschwitz) but he adds emphatically that he wasn't allowed to talk to them so he didn't know what was going on. He is ragged poor and nearly toothless, his rubber boots are caked with dried mud, his filthy faded pants might once have been a worker's blue and his face is stubbled and creased so deeply it looks as if made out of tree bark. Alejandro shakes his head impatiently. He wants specific information about his family--where the house stood, what they were like; he wants living pictures of them out of these old men's mouths. A story about a young boy carting off a bunch of Jews is too vague. Its not enough for the ghost family Fogel--we're both sure they wouldn't like it and that's why now that we've come home to them they're ignoring us.

We walk up the road hoping to find more old people who might remember something distinct and tangible about the Fogels. Suddenly a child runs up from behind us and says we must come back. The old man remembers something. We are encouraged, we turn and go quickly. He is in the same spot as before and now he lifts his head and grins at us. His mouth is toothless--a cave of darkness that might hold treasures for us--those treasures are the memories that can give a voice to a disappeared past. We wait for him to talk to us. He asks us for a pack of cigarettes and pauses to receive it before he goes on to tell us that he does remember Alejandro's grandfather-- yes he was a short butcher man everybody called Boubou. But Alejandro was always told his grandfather was quite tall. Perhaps the old man is confused. Perhaps this old man wants another pack of cigarettes (to trade not smoke) and will make up a variety of tales to get them. Perhaps his memories are a bit of both--real and confabulated, or maybe they are totally true but about somebody else's grandfather. We leave the old man to his stories; we don't trust them.

I keep wondering if a place is the same place throughout the passage of time when its houses are the same, or its streets or the fountain where the inhabitants draw their water are located in the same places, but the majority of its community has been erased, replaced by another. Is Sacel still here I wonder? Alejandro is determined to find the exact location of his father's house--that's what keeps us walking in this melting heat. (Behind the church Moishe had told us, a little to the side, on the big street). But he didn't tell us there were two churches and we have to imagine which one is 'the one'. Again, some of the old ones say the Jews lived near the Orthodox church, others insist by the Catholic. We finally decide on the Catholic as it is the one near the village water supply which Moishe had recollected being close by. We know the house was destroyed after the war but Alejandro wants to take a picture of where it was; he wants to stand where it stood and look around. He wants to place himself in the imaginary threshold and listen to his grandmother calling her children and see her with their eyes which he has been deprived of because they were killed in Europe long before he was born in Argentina. Neither us can grasp that the grandfather my husband searches for is younger than himself, having died in Auschwitz when he was only forty. Alejandro says he thinks we are close to the right spot now--I look where he's pointing and there's nothing there but a rough wooden fence locking in a vegetable garden. No foundation, no roof tile, no remnant of any house but still he is sure this is the place or he has decided it the way a child decides the outcome of a story even if its end has nothing to do with the events that went before it. This ending, this invisible house must stand on its own foundation of conjecture--located by a geometry of 'it was near this, before that, at the corner of that.' Alejandro takes a handful of earth from the side of the road near this home-place which may or may not be the right one and shoves the soil into a baggie. "For my father" he says, extracting an ant that found its way in. Suddenly two BMWs rush by on their way not to Sacel but some other town--probably a mountain resort or hunter's paradise-- that forces them to pass through this one. They are going so fast that they seem cartoonish here--Roadrunner meets Hansel and Gretel land. I keep thinking how determined the Nazis had to have been to make sure they picked up all the Jews from this remote village. How much time it must have taken, how much effort and ambition to get here and pack them up in horse carts and drag them off hours away to the closest town on a railway line. What an obsession with cleanliness--to clean the Earth of a race as the only way to supplant vision.

My own family's past has never been of much importance to me. I have no urge to find the location of the farmhouse where my father's family lived outside of Slutzk or the city house my mother's father grew up in Rovno. They were so happy not to be in the Old Country anymore that I never pressured them with questions about it. "We all left, thanks God" they told us grandchildren, "so why look back?" But in my husband's existence and surely in his father's there is a terrible need to look back because so much family was lost there. This urge to remember, to bring back the dead flows like blood from one generation to the next. My husband is not a sentimental man or even a particularly warm family man, but in this quest he is passionate and I would say almost consumed. Unlike my husband, I have real memories and photographs of so many of my Old Country relatives (Alejandro has no pictures of his paternal grandparents--only his father's memories). I remember their funny accents, their exotic way of sipping tea from glasses with cubes of sugar held in their teeth, the silver braided hair and flowered dresses of my great aunts, the straw hats and suspenders of my great uncles, their foreignness which as a child I thought was a quality of all old people, like reading glasses or false teeth. As far as I know all my immigrant relatives died of natural causes. They were not a mystery to me nor an unbreachable abyss in the knowledge of myself. They were not the cause of my father's nightmares. I knew them so they didn't matter. I wore their frequent presence--the Sunday gatherings of great aunts and uncles on our screened porch-- in confident ignorance and consequently I know far less about who they were and what they did than Alejandro knows about his lost family. But we are here in Sacel 2000 and we can't find his family--the dirt in our baggie seems a stupid souvenir like the holy water you can get in little vials all over Israel where Alejandro's father lives now.

Alejandro may be looking for ancestral ghosts but they have begun to bore me with their insistent hiding. I start to look around to see where I am in Sacel 2000. There is a huge block cement building painted pink that is the town hall which is open today even though it is Sunday because it is the time for the country to vote in local elections. As I find out later only 34% will vote even though it is compulsory, as most think it is a hopeless action and their lives won't change no matter who is in power. But voting or not the villagers are out in the street and lining its single road--women standing hands on hips, men huddled in secretive circles, the elderly sitting precariously on narrow stone ledges, their feet in the sandy gutters. There are no cafes or bars in which to congregate, no municipal benches or shade trees under which to sit. The women are dressed in dirndl skirts and babushkas(black for the many widows, bright pink and green floral for the rest); the men in wide shepherd belts with a hundred useful pockets and sheep vests that only cover one arm . I suppose they are attired this way for church-- though Gellert says that many wear these clothes of their ancestors all the time. Their one concession to modernity is shoes--the women mostly wear sneakers although one or two have the old hand made slippers that tip up like those in the Arabian Nights and are laced up to the knees with rough black cord. I watch the old women--their widows' black dirndl skirts just covering their knees and the slight flirtatious show of white petticoat beneath, the bright white embroidered blouses--starched stiff with fat puffing sleeves and gathered full and inward to accentuate their breasts and hips. Their faces are long ovals with crystalline blue eyes, pale as a overcast day yet piercing, the way the sun is as it breaks through such days. Almost all the villagers over the age of 40 are missing a great many teeth. The wealthier of the poor (as everyone is poor here) have mouths studded with gold and I start wondering how this costly tradition got started for people who barely make enough to feed and clothe themselves. Why would the first 'comfort item' be golden teeth? This makes me realize I can't understand anything about these people or this place in one day and I feel sad we can't stay longer. But Sacel 2000 isn't Alejandro's mission, in fact it might interfere with what he's trying to find.

I watch Alejandro adjusting his video camera, his tee shirt drenched with sweat, his forehead burnt a fleshy red. He is trying to find his father here and I can tell he is disappointed, by turns frustrated and bored. We go walking again, back up the street towards the Catholic church. There are narrow dirt side roads off the main one and they are crammed with wooden houses, shacks, and barns. Sacel is a forest of wood shingled structures, shabby and crudely constructed--almost like American log cabins but here the boards are planed flat. There are wide bare openings between the boards that make me shiver as I look up at the steep roofs that tell me this is a place of heavy snow. The color of this wood is remarkable--it looks as if it has been burnt and that it should smell like a wood fire. But I put my face up close to a beam and take a big sniff and it doesn't. The roof is wood too--shingles made from the fibrous bark of the ancient pine trees of the Carpathians. Here they are again, transformed. Skinned from their trunks, they shine gray upturned squares in the sun and remind me of little note pads. I can imagine each shingle scrawled over with ink: buy milk, chop firewood, make soup. But there is no writing on their sharp slopes that could ever shrug off the snow that falls each year and turns the town to ice. I decide that the buildings are really tree princesses who were turned into houses by the forest witch due to some crime they committed that no one but the witch, herself understands or remembers. Under the solemn eaves of these beautiful forlorn changelings are nailed the most hideous creatures--chemical red and polluted green plastic wash basins ringed with the white residue of calcified water. They are as much a symbol of the poverty here as the crude wood planked houses. The houses are beautiful-- after all they are the forest, twisted and scraped and reformed, but still you can smell and feel the spirit of the woods in them. But these horrible plastic tubs--what root do they have in nature, what can we smell in them that makes us clean or brings our memory to shine? I can see some old woven work baskets stacked in a corner, long unused, covered with pigeon shit and cobwebs, they must have been there since the time of Alejandro's father's childhood. But clearly they aren't as practical for holding things or as light to carry as the magic plastic bowls so they've been retired. I can imagine Moishe using one of those straw baskets everyday to gather kindling. He would wake up before dawn from the bed he shared with three other brothers, throw off the sheep skin covers, and slip down to the dirt floor. He would be barefoot as they could only afford to wear their shoes for shul or cheder. He would push his thin body out the jumble of wood slats that was their front door and he'd step outside and all around him rising up like a princess's satin gown would be the emerald Carpathians...forested in black clumps, the rest a beautiful bald green topped with snow on the highest peaks where he could imagine God and Heaven and the hierarchy of angels but where he could play, too, like any other boy--like the ones who now surround us to show us their magnifying glass and how it concentrates the sun in a point and bursts the grass into flame. He would have heard his friends calling and forgot all about the basket and his chores. Yes, one of the boys I see hanging out in his 49ers football jersey and backwards baseball cap studying the ground with a magnifying glass could be the Moishe I was just imagining--though I am sure he was even poorer than this boy and he would have been dressed in the traditional manner of the Hassidic Jew. And he never would have owned a magnifying glass--the money if there was any left after buying food and clothes and firewood would go to books on Torah and Mishnah--commentaries on the Old Testament and commentaries on the commentaries rolling down the ravine that is five thousand years of Jewish thought. No, I am sure, Moishe Fogel had no looking glass with which to burn the earth. Maybe he would have if he knew what was coming.