The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  From the twentieth-century editor of Ber Birkenthal’s memoirs, a man called Vishnitzer, we learn that the town of Bolechow, where Ber was born, is situated in the eastern part of the province known as Galicia, which stretched from Kraków in the west to Lemberg (now L’viv) in the east. This part of Galicia is quite close to the Carpathian Mountains, which constitute a formidable natural barrier to Hungary, which lies to the south. (One that, however, can be breached, as I learned from an old woman who, as a young girl in 1943, walked barefoot over the Carpathians from Bolechow to Hungary, where the local Jews, to whom war had not yet come, found it hard to believe the reasons for this girl’s desperate flight.) The specific plot of Galician land on which the town of Bolechow was established had been owned by a Polish nobleman called Nicholas Giedsinski; in 1612 Giedsinski laid the foundations of the town and granted it a charter. In this charter the Polish lord laid down the laws that were to govern the three communities that coexisted in the place: Jews, Poles, and (as the charter puts it), “Ruthenians,” which is what Ukrainians used to be called. Vishnitzer points out that Jews had settled in this area before the place became a proper town, but a regular community arose only after 1612, when the charter granted by Giedsinski provided equal rights and liberties for the Jews.

  Vishnitzer goes on to describe the rare privileges the Jews of Bolechow enjoyed upon its founding almost four hundred years ago. They were, he writes, allowed to acquire landed property in the center of the town and to build houses there. (It was right there on the Ringplatz, my grandfather would say to me when I was a boy, referring to his family’s store: right there on the main square.) The town’s Jews were ceded a plot of land for the erection of a synagogue and, across the little river that runs through the town, a plot for use as a burial ground. If you go there today, one of the first things you see, as you hop across a little creek onto the grounds of the cemetery, is a big headstone on the back of which is written the name JAGER.

  The Jews of Bolechow, the author of this book goes on, could vote in the election of the Burgomeister (who, on taking office, had to swear to protect the rights of all three nationalities who lived in Bolechow) and of the aldermen of the Municipal Council. They enjoyed legal protections: the Polish municipal court could not settle a dispute between a Jew and a Gentile without the assistance of representatives of the Jewish community. (My grandfather told me that his father had once quietly intervened with the Austrian authorities, with whom he apparently enjoyed excellent relations, perhaps because of all those bottles of Tokay, in order to help an impoverished Jew get out of jail. A word from him was worth something, my grandfather told me.) So it is no wonder that, as Vishnitzer puts it, “harmony prevailed in the relations between the Jews and their Gentile neighbours.”

  Not surprisingly, given his scholarly enthusiasms and his success as a merchant, Ber Birkenthal’s memoirs oscillate between the arcane and (far more frequently) the mundane. There are, to be sure, learned allusions to biblical verses. “One night,” he writes, “a sentence from the Bible came into my head. It was from Psalm 58, verse 5: ‘Their poison is like the poison of a serpent: they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear; which will not hearken to the voice of charmers…. As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass away: like the untimely birth of a woman, that they may not see the sun.’” But more often, Ber goes on about ordinary things, from politics (“After Poniatowski had been appointed Commander-in-Chief…”), business irritations (“I was very disappointed at not being able to obtain any of the old wines. I discussed the matter with my partner on our way from Miskolcz, as I had no other opportunity of doing so, because I had to return to Lemberg…”), local dramas (“With great difficulty, and by dint of tireless efforts and many intercessions, they were released from prison…”), and domestic matters. (“When my sister and sister-in-law, Rachel, learned of my desire to marry this widow, they talked to Yenta, so that the match might soon be made.”)

  An ordinary life, in other words, despite the extraordinary intellect of the memoirist. Still, it must be said that by the time Ber of Bolechow was prominent in Bolechow, the world was a less stable place than it had been a century and a half before, when the foundations of the little town were laid down by the Polish nobleman. Political instability was rife throughout Poland during the eighteenth century, and incursions of Russians and Tatars and Cossacks inevitably wreaked havoc on the Jews of the little town. And so it was that, in July 1759, Ber Birkenthal of Bolechow dreamed a terrible dream, a dream of pain that turned out to be a premonition: a dream, he writes with anguish, that his wife had gone into “severe labor.” He knew this to be a sign, and sure enough he learned, the next day, that twenty-eight Ruthenian ruffians had descended from the timbered hills above the town and, taking the Jewish neighborhood by surprise, laid waste several Jewish homes and killed a man. Ber’s property and family were not exempt from the destruction, which Ber himself vividly describes in his memoir. Given the existence of this eyewitness account of events that are so distant from anything I could ever have experienced, and which therefore I have a difficult time “imagining” or “envisioning,” I prefer to avoid paraphrase and instead will simply cite his description:

  In the meanwhile two other robbers had entered my house and found my wife Leah still in bed. They demanded a large sum of money, whereupon my wife gave them a ducat and 20 gulden, apologizing that she had not another farthing in ready money. One of them hit her cruel blows with an axe on her arm and back, so that the flesh and skin remained black for a long time. They commanded her to hand over to them the golden ornaments and pearls. Some said that the Gentile inhabitants of our town had informed the robbers that they would find such things in my house. My wife had to hand over all her precious things: two necklaces of fine and beautiful pearls, one of four rows and the other of five rows, a head-dress of great value and beauty, and ten gold rings set with magnificent and rare diamonds. The value of all these things amounted at that time to 3000 gulden. Besides this the robbers took away the furniture, and burnt the house.

  The surprise attack, the Gentile informer, the robbery and the violent assault, the greedy appropriation of rare diamond rings: all this would happen again. (The Polish nickname for Leah, the name of Ber’s wife, is, I should mention, Lorka.) But there were, too, unexpected and inexplicable kindnesses. Ber goes on to commend the thoughtfulness of a Gentile maid who stayed behind to rescue her master’s books from the conflagration. “She took pity on the books,” he writes, “because she knew that I was fond of them.” Such acts would also be repeated, centuries later.

  But the terror Ber describes in this passage, while not unknown in Bolechow and other Austro-Hungarian towns, was not the rule. The Memoirs of Ber of Bolechow is not especially literary, and the minutiae of business deals and court cases, to say nothing of the esoterica of early modern publishing, are unlikely to win many readers; but the very ordinariness of the life that this strange, forgotten book records is, it now seems, knowing what we know, quite precious.

  After all, the only other book, to my knowledge, that had ever been written about Bolechow and its Jews until very recently is a book titled Sefer HaZikaron LeKedoshei Bolechow, or “Memorial Book of the Martyrs of Bolechow,” edited by Y. Eshel and published in 1957 by a group calling itself the Association of Former Residents of Bolechow. It is, in other words, what’s called a Yizkor book: one of the hundreds of books compiled after World War II, filled with the reminiscences of people who’d left before the war and the witness statements of those who hadn’t, in order to memorialize the communities—little towns, big cities—that were destroyed, and of course to commemorate, inasmuch as was possible, a way of life that had been lost. I own a copy of this book, which my grandfather used to own; it’s bound in blue cloth, now very faded, and the text is in Hebrew and Yiddish. I used to wonder, when I was a boy and my grandfather would, very rarely, let me handle this precious object, why they published it in a language that (as I then thought) only t
he victims could understand. My grandfather would show me the photographs in the book, and on a piece of stationery from the company he used to own—my grandfather also had a great impulse to save things, to preserve—which he later placed between the pages separating the Hebrew and Yiddish sections, he wrote the numbers of all the pages on which his family were mentioned. This is what he wrote, sometimes in block capitals, sometimes in his loping script, very occasionally letting slip an error in spelling:

  44—BARON HIRSH JEWISH SCHOOL

  67—BOTTON CITY HALL right

  67—Bottom our store Left

  110—THE CENTER OF TOWN HAD A FIRE

  282—ISAK and SHMIEL my two brothers

  189—The public School I attendet

  The underlining is, uncharacteristically, the only emphasis. It is, indeed, odd to see my grandfather’s writing, which I knew so well—to hear his voice, as it were—describing something so laconically, so devoid of the snaking cadences and the ornate enhancements and additions that once made all those stories about his world, his childhood, this town, so memorable to me. At the bottom of this piece of paper is the printed motto of his company: TRIMMINGS ALWAYS MAKE IT LOOK BETTER.

  And there is something else I see: I notice, now, the way that my grandfather, who when talking to me always called his older sister Ruchele “Ray” and his younger sister Neche “Jeanette” and his brother Yidl “Julius,” always referred, as he did while writing this list, to the lost brother as Shmiel. Which is to say, not by the public, “official” name, Sam (which is, I learned much later, the way he referred to himself), the name that corresponded to the Rays and Jeanettes and Juliuses, but only by the Yiddish name: Shmiel. I think this is because for him, the others had two identities, the one that belonged to a lost childhood in an empire that no longer existed, a time when you spoke Yiddish, and the other that belonged to his adulthood, when the names of so many things had shifted. But of course the last time my grandfather saw his older brother was in 1920, when he, an adventurous eighteen-year-old, left Bolechow forever, and his failure to think of this brother as anything but Shmiel, his consistent use of that Yiddish name, suggests to me how truly lost this murdered brother must really have been, like an unsmiling face in a picture that has lost its caption.

  The interesting thing, for the present, is the answer to the question first raised by my grandfather’s bold statement that his family had lived in Bolechow since before there was a Bolechow to live in. How long was that, then? Between them, our two books give us the answer. From the first book, the memoirs of Ber Birkenthal, the sage of Bolechow, we learn when it all started; from the last book, of course, we know when it ended. The Jägers lived in Bolechow for the entirety of the three and a half centuries during which it existed as its founders had intended, a community in which Jews, Poles, and Ruthenians would live in relative harmony. Which is to say, from the year 1612, when the fair-minded Count Giedsinski laid the foundations, until 1941, when the Germans came from the west, and the Ruthenians descended again.

  AND SO, FOR a long time, the sum total of our knowledge was this:

  We knew a great deal about my Jäger relatives, going back to the names of my great-great-grandparents, Hersh and Feige Mittelmark and Isak and Neche Jäger. We knew about the businesses they ran, the kind of town they lived in, the names of their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and, in the cases of many of these, their dates of birth and death and marriage. We knew about the history of Bolechow, where it was on the map. We knew what the faces of many of these people looked like from the old photographs carefully tended in my mother’s album. We knew a great many stories.

  And about the lost we knew, at least, this:

  We knew that Shmiel Jäger and his wife, Ester, and their four daughters, who I then thought were called Lorca, Friedka, Ruchatz, and Bronia, lived in a house somewhere in Bolechow, as Jägers had been doing for three hundred years. Their address, I learned from a copy of a 1929 Polish business directory, was 9a Dlugosa Street.

  We knew that in September 1939 the Nazis invaded Poland, but the Jews of eastern Poland were given a reprieve in the form of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which assigned the region that contained Bolechow to the Soviet Union. What Shmiel and his family endured under the Soviets, nobody knew.

  We knew that the Nazis broke the pact in the summer of 1941, and soon after, at the beginning of the summer, they invaded eastern Poland. Soon after that, they arrived in Bolechow.

  We knew that Shmiel owned a truck. (Trucks?) We’d heard that the Nazis wanted the trucks.

  We’d heard that he was one of the first on the list. (List?)

  We’d heard that at some point they went into some kind of hiding place. Perhaps it was the old castle belonging to the Polish counts, the Giedsinskis who had once owned the town when it was a private holding. My grandfather had, after all, said that they were hiding in a kessel.

  Anyway, they were hiding. Or some of them were hiding.

  We’d heard that the neighbor betrayed them and turned them in,

  (or)

  that the Polish maid, the shiksa, betrayed them and turned them in. Which was it? Impossible to know.

  We’d read in Aunt Miriam’s letter that in 1942 the Germans killed Ester and two of the daughters. This must have been Ruchatz and Bronia. Were they in the same hiding place as the others? Impossible to know.

  Aunt Miriam had said that Lorca somehow escaped and fought in the hills with the partisans, with whom she was later killed. Which hills? Which partisans? When? How? Had she been hiding, too? Impossible to know.

  She’d written that Uncle Shmiel and Frydka were killed by the Germans in 1944. Were they in a different hiding place? How and why had they been separated? Impossible to know.

  And for a long time, that’s what we knew. It wasn’t a great deal, but it was a great deal more than Killed by the Nazis. For a long time, it was as much as we ever thought we’d know; and given the extent of annihilation, given how many years had passed, given that there was, now, no one left to ask, it seemed like a lot.

  The beginning chapters of Bereishit, the part that begins with the creation of the cosmos and narrows, over time, to the story of Adam and Eve and their fatal expulsion from Paradise (which is, too, the beginning of all of human history) tells us much about the pleasure to be had from the Tree of Knowledge: We know that it was good, it was a delight to the eyes, it was something “desirable for comprehension”—in other words, necessary for making distinctions, for, ultimately, creating. (For it is only after eating of the Tree that Adam and Eve go on to procreate.)

  And yet we all know, too, that the Tree confers pain as well as pleasure. For the pleasurable knowledge that comes from eating the fruit of the tree is conjoined with great pain—expulsion from Paradise, labor, childbirth—and leads, indeed, to the greatest pain of all, which is death.

  In my ongoing search for the helpful meanings that may be found in parashat Bereishit, which is after all the beginning of Torah’s vast explication of the meanings of Jewish history, I have yet to discover an answer to a question I have had since I was a small child, when I first read this story in Sunday school. Why, I used to wonder, should Knowledge come from a tree? Why not from a rock, a cloud, a river—a book, even? The trees I was familiar with, then, offered no answers. The front of our house was guarded by a horizontal line of tall pin oaks, which didn’t seem particularly wise, while in the back there stood, for a while, enormous, sulky willows, one quite close to the house—its farthest fronds used to brush, creepily, against the windows of my brothers’ and my bedrooms during storms—and the other at the far edge of our property, in a corner next to the compost heap, which my industrious father hoped, each year, would become “established.” Under one of these, years after I stopped attending Sunday school, I would overhear my parents and their parents reveal a secret about my father’s father that startled me, and which drew me more passionately into a study of his family than I had ever thought likely.
Another of these would come crashing down during a hurricane that improbably hit the New York area in August 1976, the tops of its (luckily) tender upper branches squashed softly against the big window of my mother’s kitchen, so that when she walked into the kitchen the morning after hearing something go “crash” in the night, she screamed on seeing this monstrous mass looming in the window, looking for all the world as though it was about to devour the window, on the broad sill of which she would meticulously display some favorite tchotchkes: blue and white Delft candlesticks, vaguely modernistic Israeli utensils made of aromatic olive wood, brightly colored Italian ceramic jugs and vases filled with the plants that flourished so exuberantly in her care. It was on the day before this storm felled our willow tree, in fact, that the wife of my grandfather’s brother Julius, the one who never seemed quite to fit into the family, the one who had no Feinheit, refinement, had to be buried, having dropped dead suddenly the night before, in an elevator in their apartment building in the Bronx. Dutifully, my parents assembled us children and we all drove out, in the day of obliterating rain that preceded the hurricane itself, to Mount Judah, where poor Roslyn, dead at only fifty-eight, would be buried where all the other Jaegers, Yaegers, Jagers, and Jägers of Bolechow were patiently waiting. And of that sodden funeral, my mother tells one of her favorite stories: the story of how, as we Mendelsohns waited for the rest of the funeral party to arrive, in a downpour so furious that it punched holes in our umbrellas and half filled the open grave with muddy water in a way that made me, for the first time, wonder just what happened after the grave was sealed, she suddenly had the idea that we should all wait in the relative comfort of a nearby mausoleum, and how when one of us, terrified, resisted, my mother said, “Oh, come on, how bad could it be? It’s just nice old Jewish people in there!”