It was during this interview that I first learned of Radom, although at the time I had no concept of how significant this place once was to my grandfather, or how important it would become to me—so much so that twenty years later, I would be drawn to visit the city, to walk the cobblestone streets, imagining what it might have been like to grow up there. My grandmother pointed to Radom on a map, and I wondered aloud whether, after the war, my grandfather ever returned to his old hometown. No, my grandmother said. Eddy never had any interest in going back. She went on to explain that Eddy was lucky enough to be living in France when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 and that he was the only member of his family to escape from Europe at the start of the war. She told me he was once engaged to a Czech woman he met aboard a ship called the Alsina; that she herself first laid eyes on him in Rio de Janeiro, at a party in Ipanema; that their first child, Kathleen, was born in Rio just a few days before he reunited with his family—parents and siblings, aunts and uncles and cousins he hadn’t seen or heard from for nearly a decade. Somehow, they’d all miraculously survived a war that annihilated over 90 percent of Poland’s Jews and (I would later discover) all but about 300 of the 30,000 Jews from Radom.
Once his family was settled in Brazil, my grandmother explained, she and my grandfather moved to the United States, where my mother, Isabelle, and my uncle Tim were born. My grandfather didn’t waste any time in changing his name from Adolf Kurc (pronounced “Koortz” in Polish) to Eddy Courts or in taking the oath of American citizenship. It was a new chapter for him, my grandmother said. When I asked if he maintained any of his customs from the Old World, she nodded. He barely spoke of his Jewish upbringing, and no one knew he was born in Poland—but he had his ways about him. Just as the piano was an integral part of his own upbringing, my grandfather insisted that his children practice an instrument every day. Conversation at the dinner table had to be in French. He made espresso long before most of his neighbors had ever heard of it, and he loved haggling with the open-air vendors at Boston’s Haymarket Square (from which he would often return with a paper-wrapped beef tongue, insisting that it was a delicacy). The only candy he allowed in the house was dark chocolate, brought back from his travels to Switzerland.
My interview with my grandmother left my head spinning. It was as if a veil had been lifted, and I could see my grandfather clearly for the first time. Those oddities, those traits that I’d chalked up as quirks—many of them, I realized, could be attributed to his European roots. The interview also sparked an array of questions. What happened to his parents? His siblings? How did they survive the war? I pressed my grandmother for details, but she was able to share only a few sparse facts about her in-laws. I met his family after the war, she said. They hardly spoke of their experiences. At home, I asked my mother to tell me all that she knew. Did Papa ever talk to you about growing up in Radom? Did he tell you about the war? The answer was always no.
And then in the summer of 2000, a few weeks after I’d graduated from college, my mother offered to host a Kurc family gathering at our house on Martha’s Vineyard. Her cousins agreed—they didn’t see each other nearly enough, and many of their children had never even met. It was time for a reunion. As soon as the idea was seeded, the cousins (there are ten in all) began arranging their travel, and when July rolled around, family flew in from Miami, Oakland, Seattle, and Chicago, and from as far away as Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and Tel Aviv. With children and spouses included, we numbered thirty-two in total.
Each night of our reunion, my mother’s generation, along with my grandmother, would gather on the back porch after dinner and talk. Most nights I’d hang out with my cousins, draped over the living room sofas, comparing hobbies and tastes in music and movies. (How was it that my Brazilian and French cousins knew American pop culture better than I did?) On the last evening, however, I wandered outside, settled down on a picnic bench next to my aunt Kath, and listened.
My mother’s cousins conversed with a sense of ease, despite their distinctly different upbringings and native tongues and the fact that many hadn’t seen each other in decades. There was laughter, a song—a Polish lullaby that Ricardo and his younger sister, Anna, recalled from their childhoods, taught to them by their grandparents, they said—a joke, more laughter, a toast to my grandmother, the lone representative of my grandfather’s generation. Languages often alternated midsentence between English, French, and Portuguese; it was all I could do to keep up. But I managed, and when conversation shifted to my grandfather and then to the war, I leaned in.
My grandmother’s eyes brightened as she recounted meeting my grandfather for the first time in Rio. It took me years to learn Portuguese, she said. Eddy learned English in weeks. She spoke of how obsessed my grandfather was with American idioms and how she didn’t have the heart to correct him when he botched one in conversation. My aunt Kath shook her head as she recalled my grandfather’s habit of showering in his undergarments—a means of bathing and laundering his clothes simultaneously when he was on the road; he would do just about anything, she said, in the name of efficiency. My uncle Tim remembered how my grandfather would embarrass him when he was a kid by striking up conversations with everyone, from waiters to passersby on the street. He could talk to anyone, he said, and the others laughed, nodded, and from the way their eyes shined I could tell how adored my grandfather was by his nieces and nephews.
I laughed along with the others, wishing I’d known my grandfather as a young man, and then grew quiet when a Brazilian cousin, Józef, began telling stories of his father—my grandfather’s older brother. Genek and his wife, Herta, I learned, had been exiled during the war to a Siberian gulag. Goose bumps sprang to my arms as Józef told of how he was born in the barracks, in the thick of winter, how it was so cold his eyes would freeze shut at night and his mother would use the warmth of her breast milk each morning to gently pry them open.
Hearing this, it was all I could do not to shout, She what? But as shocking as the revelation was, others soon followed, each somehow as astounding as the last. There was the story of Halina’s hike over the Austrian Alps—while pregnant; of a forbidden wedding in a blacked-out house; of false IDs and a last-ditch attempt to disguise a circumcision; of a daring breakout from a ghetto; of a harrowing escape from a killing field. My first thought was, Why am I just learning these things now? And then: Someone needs to write these stories down.
At the time, I had no idea that someone would be me. I didn’t go to bed that night thinking I should write a book about my family history. I was twenty-one, with a freshly minted degree under my arm, focused on finding a job, an apartment, my place in the “real world.” Nearly a decade would pass before I’d set off for Europe with a digital voice recorder and an empty notebook to begin interviewing relatives about the family’s experiences during the war. What I fell asleep with that evening was a stirring sensation in my gut. I was inspired. Intrigued. I had a boatload of questions, and I craved answers.
I have no idea what time it was when we all finally meandered back to our rooms from the porch—I just recall that it was Felicia, the oldest of my mother’s cousins, who was the last to speak. She was a bit more reserved than the others, I’d noticed. While her cousins were gregarious and uninhibited, Felicia was serious, guarded. When she spoke, there was sadness in her eyes. I’d learned that night that she was a year old at the start of the war, eight at its end. Her memory was still sharp, it seemed, but sharing her experiences made her uneasy. It would be years before I would gently uncover her story, but I remember thinking that whatever memories she harbored must have been painful.
“Our family,” Felicia said in her thick French accent, her tone sober, “we shouldn’t have survived. Not so many of us, at least.” She paused, listening to the breeze rattling the leaves in the scrub oak trees beside the house. The rest of us were silent. I held my breath, waiting for her to go on, to offer up some sort of explanation. Felicia sighed and brought a hand to the place on her neck where her skin was still pockmarked, I would later learn, by a near-fatal case of scurvy she’d contracted during the war. “It’s a miracle in many ways,” she finally said, looking out toward the tree line. “We were the lucky ones.”
These words would stay with me until the burn to understand how, exactly, my relatives could have defied such odds finally overcame me and I couldn’t help but start digging for answers. We Were the Lucky Ones is the story of my family’s survival.
Since Then