The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  How happy are the people who are lucky in that respect—although I know that in America life doesn’t shine on everyone; still, at least they aren’t gripped by constant terror. The situation with the truck-permit gets worse from day to day, businesses are frozen, it’s a crisis, no one has any business, everything is tense. God grant that Hitler should be torn to bits! Then we’d finally breathe again, after all we’ve been through.

  A little later on, though, in a letter to his sister Jeanette, it’s plain that the “time of crisis” refers to more than business headaches:

  From reading the papers you know a little about what the Jews are going through here; but what you know is just one one-hundredth of it: when you go out into the street or drive on the road you’re barely 10% sure that you’ll come back with a whole head, or your legs in one piece. Work permits have all been taken away from the Jews, etc.

  Here, then, is an escalation: the physical violence from which the Polish government liked to think itself aloof was clearly a reality for the already economically oppressed Jewish merchants of Galicia. And indeed we know, from contemporary newspaper accounts, that in the late 1930s in Poland, the number of violent attacks against Jews rose sharply: in 150 towns, between 1935 and 1937, nearly thirteen hundred Jews were injured and hundreds were killed by…well, by their neighbors: the Poles, the Ukrainians with whom they’d lived side by side more or less peacefully, “like a family” (as an old woman in Bolechow put it to me, later) for so many years…until something was unleashed and the bonds dissolved. The Germans were bad, my grandfather used to tell me, describing—from what authority, from what sources, from what hearsay I do not and cannot know—what happened to Bolechow’s Jews during World War II. The Poles were worse. But the Ukrainians were the worst of all. A month before I went to Ukraine with my own siblings, I stood in the stifling lobby of the Ukrainian consulate on East Forty-ninth Street in New York, waiting for a visa, and as I stood there I would look around at the people standing next to me, who were all talking animatedly and often exasperatedly in Ukrainian to each other, yelling at the solitary officer behind the bulletproof glass, and the line the Ukrainians were the worst would go through my head, over and over, acquiring its own kind of rhythm.

  It is in these later letters that Shmiel’s tone becomes panicked. In a letter to my grandfather, written probably in the fall of 1939—in it, he asks my grandfather how he spent his summer—he talks about the possibility of sending even one of his four daughters abroad, once again hinting at his difficult financial situation:

  If only the world were open and I’d been able to send a child to America or Palestine, it would be easier, since today children cost a great deal, particularly girls—

  Dear God should only grant that the world should be quiet, because now it’s absolutely clouded. One lives constantly in terror.

  Don’t be broyges [Yiddish: “angry”] with me, my dears, because I write you so many letters in this pessimistic vein, it’s no wonder—in life now there are so many opportunities for people to be so evil to each other—

  I’ve now written to you so many times dear Aby…

  It is difficult to miss the tone of reproof in that last line.

  It is clear that, by late in 1939, Shmiel was obsessed by the idea of getting his family out of Poland. In that last letter to his sister Jeanette and his brother-in-law, Sam Mittlemark, his mind is racing:

  Anyway this is my mission: it’s now the case that many families can go, and have already emigrated, to America provided that their families there put down a $5000 deposit, after which they can get their brother and his wife and children out, and then they can get the deposit back; and I’m of the opinion that they also take securities and perhaps you could manage to advance me the deposit; the idea is that with the money in custody I won’t, once I’m in America, be a burden to anyone. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had to contact you with no money. If I have to sell everything that I’m able to I’d have about $1000 left, not including costs, to bring to America, but of course as long as there’s a possibility that I could save all of us in so doing, then there’s no question of doing that, as you know.

  Shmiel has been a businessman all his life; this is why, at first, he’s all business, all facts and figures. But soon a note of desperation creeps in. What follows is the part I always find hard to read:

  You should make inquiries, you should write that I’m the only one in your family still in Europe, and that I have training as an auto mechanic and that I’ve already been to America from 1912 to 1913—

  (here he is referring, of course, to the disastrous visit that he made, as an eighteen-year-old boy, to his uncle Abe’s apartment, the trip that convinced him that going back to Poland was his ticket to success)

  —perhaps that might work…. For my part, I am going to post a letter, written in English, to Washington, addressed to President Roosevelt and will write that all my siblings and my entire family are in America and that my parents are even buried there…perhaps that will work. Consult with my sister-in-law Mina and maybe she can give you some advice about this, as I really want to get away from this Gehenim with my dear wife and such darling four children.

  My sister-in-law Mina: Minnie Spieler, whom I used to make fun of and ignore.

  Shmiel spells the president’s name Rosiwelt, and spells the name of the capital city Waschington, and for some reason this has the effect of dissolving the scholarly calm with which I try, whenever I read these texts, to decipher Shmiel’s train of thought. I think of this man. I think of him writing that letter of pleading and cajoling, that letter to “President Rosiwelt” in “Waschington,” and then I think of everything Shmiel was, and of what he thought of himself in the world; I think, indeed, of how he closes this particular letter with a reassertion of his native pride—

  but I emphasize here to you all that I do not want to leave here without something to live on…life is the most precious thing of all, as long as you’ve got a roof over your head and bread in your mouth and all is safe and sound. I’ll now close my letter for today, and await a swift answer to the whole question & what you have to say about it

  —I think of all this, and I can’t help wondering whether, as some clerk in Washington, D.C., opened a certain letter with a strange postmark, sometime in 1939, a letter written in stilted, high school English, he bothered to read it, or simply dismissed what was, after all, just another indecipherable missive from some little Jew in Poland.

  IN ALL OF the stories I used to hear about how Shmiel and his family died, there was the terrible crime, the terrible betrayal: maybe the wicked neighbor, maybe the unfaithful Polish maid. But none of these betrayals worried me as much as did the possibility of one that was far worse.

  Because Shmiel’s home, and his belongings, and eventually his life were all taken from him, the only letters that survived are the ones from, not to, Poland. And so we have no way of knowing how, or whether, the others who were close to Shmiel—not the Polish maid or the Jewish (or Polish, or Ukrainian) neighbors, but the cousin, the brother, the sister, the brother-in-law to whom he’d written so frantically—ever responded. Or if they did respond, how fervently? I have read these letters many times, and I worry now whether enough had been done for them. Really done, I mean. It’s true that in one letter, which was addressed to my grandfather, Shmiel refers to some money he’d received—eighty dollars; so there was some response. But what about the affidavit? Why, given the frequency and intensity of Shmiel’s letters to his siblings in New York, is he always complaining that he doesn’t hear from anyone? In the fall of 1939:

  Dear darling Brother and dear darling Sister-in-Law,

  Since it’s been so long since I’ve had a letter from you, I’m hurrying one off to you to remind you to let me know how you all are doing and especially how the whole dear family is. It’s also been a pretty long time since I’ve had a letter from

  Jeanette, Why? I have no idea…

  or:

  W
rite me more often, it’s like giving me a new life and I won’t feel so alone.

  Dear Ester will write you a postscript of her own. I hug and kiss you with all my heart and wish for you longingly,

  From your

  Sam

  or, the most damning:

  Dear Aby,

  I was just about to send this, when at that very moment I received your letter. You upbraid my dear wife for not having turned to her brothers and sisters. And so I write to you saying that you’re out of your mind. She already wrote to them, and never got an answer. What should she do?

  Of course there is no way to know what exactly transpired between the siblings here. What seems, on a cold reading of the words themselves, like callousness on my grandfather’s part could, after all, have been something more innocent. Perhaps, amid the treasures buried in the attics and sewers of the houses, still standing, that once belonged to the Jews of Bolechow, there is a cache of letters, stuffed with some photo albums and jewelry and wrapped in blankets and squashed into a leather valise that was sunk into the murk beneath an outhouse, among which can be found a letter with an American postmark, which begins Dear Brother, We exhausted every possibility here, but cannot raise the sum you refer to. Has Ester tried writing to her siblings here in the States?…Perhaps. Because all of the letters that my grandfather and Jeanette and Joe Mittelmark wrote (or may have written) to Shmiel have long since crumbled to dust, we cannot know.

  Still, I tried. The month before we left for Ukraine, I convened a conference of my mother and her cousins—the surviving children of Shmiel’s siblings—to ask them what memories they had of that time, just before the war, when Shmiel’s letters would have been arriving. These three cousins had all grown up together, occasionally in the same apartment buildings, in the Bronx; they all knew the same things. We sat one afternoon in June 2001, on my mother’s cousin’s patio in Chicago, and they reminisced. But they weren’t old enough, weren’t close enough to what had happened, to know for sure; all they had was an adamant certainty that everyone had adored Shmiel, and that everything possible had been done for him. I wanted hard facts, details, some story or anecdote that had the uncomfortable asymmetry of truth, but what I kept getting was the smooth sound of comforting platitudes.

  My mother’s cousin Allan, the host, said, firmly, They would have done anything possible to get them out.

  Allan is the son of the middle sister, the one who once wrote to me I’m not going to tell you when I was born because it would have been better if I’d never been born, and I never wonder why he became a psychologist.

  Everyone else enthusiastically agreed.

  I remember when the news came, after the war, that they’d died, my mother’s other cousin, Marilyn, drawled.

  Marilyn is a couple of years older than my mother, but has a smooth, almost translucent fineness of brow and nose and jaw that, she unnecessarily confides to me, she gets from her mother, my mother’s favorite aunt, Jeanette. (It was her skin that was so beautiful, but you can’t tell from the pictures, she said at some point during that weekend, in the surprisingly deep Southern accent that she had acquired during her years away from the Bronx. Picshuhs. I have many pictures of Marilyn’s mother—one in the opulent lace wedding dress her rich cousins, now her in-laws, bought to adorn their trophy bride, the other taken just before her death at thirty-five; in the latter, my mother tells me, Jeanette was mute, unable to speak because of the first of the strokes that would eventually kill her—and I am forced to agree, for none of the legendary beauty I have so often heard about is evident in these photographs of what looks to me to be a merely pleasant-looking Jewish lady of the earlier part of the last century. I wonder now whether the reason I was oddly relieved to hear from her daughter, one day almost fifty years after she died, that she was in fact beautiful, was that at this point I was still unwilling to entertain the idea that so many of my family’s stories might be embellishments or even fabrications.)

  Anyway, Marilyn was now responding to my question about what was or was not done for Shmiel by her parents, who after all are the addressees of at least two of those letters, but while she was unable to remember ever hearing them discuss Shmiel’s pleas before the war, Marilyn had vivid memories of the day, months after the war had ended, when they got the news that he and his wife and children had been killed along with all the others.

  I remember when the news came, this attractive Southern lady told me, fixing me with her wide-eyed, slightly surprised blue gaze. There wasn’t just crying—there was screaming.

  Who knows what went on between those siblings, seventy years ago? Impossible to say. At one point, during the Chicago conference of cousins, I took out the photocopied translations I’d made of Shmiel’s letters to their various parents, and handed them out.

  No, no, no, my mother said, vaguely pushing her copy across the table. I don’t want to read them, it’s too sad.

  Then she made the slightly sibilant, sad, clucking noise with her tongue that she has always made when she’s about to utter the Yiddish word nebuch, which means something like what a terrible pity.

  When Cain sulks over the fact that God has preferred his younger brother’s offering to his, God chides him: “Why are you upset, and why has your face fallen? Is it not that if you do well you’ll be raised, and if you don’t do well then sin crouches at the threshold? And its desire will be for you. And you’ll dominate it.”

  Rashi is very concerned to explain the striking if rather mysterious image of sin, like a female animal, crouching at a threshold. Where is it crouching, we wonder; at the threshold of what, exactly? “At the entrance of your grave,” Rashi replies; there “your sin is preserved.” But of even greater import to the meaning of this passage, for him, is the precise antecedent of the word “its” in the line “its desire will be for you.” The Hebrew text here is, in fact, rather vexed. “Sin,” in Hebrew, is hatâ’t, a feminine noun, and hence grammatically we would expect the text to say, literally, t’shukâtâh—“her desire.” And yet the Hebrew gives us a masculine rather than feminine possessive here: t’shukâtu, “his desire.” Which is to say that when you read this line, it seems to say “his desire,” in which case the “his” would most likely refer, if anything, to Abel. Hence the meaning of the line would seem to be something like “his desire is for you”—i.e., for reconciling with you, for maintaining good relations with you, his brother—“but you will rule over it”—in other words, you will reject this surge of brotherly goodwill, or perhaps even more accurately, you will repress any goodwill of your own that rises, however unwittingly, in response.

  Yet Rashi, for whatever reasons, is eager to rule out this reading. And so he states, of the words “its desire,” that the reference is to something not actually in the text—a phrase that is, in fact, a paraphrase of the word “sin” here, yêtzer hârâh, “drive toward evil.” Because this phrase is, grammatically speaking, masculine, Rashi thus gets around the problem of the text’s masculine possessive by supplying a masculine antecedent that is not actually in the text. Since this is a bit of a stretch, by any standard of textual emendation—and since Rashi’s ruse entails further interpretive difficulties, not least of which is the fact that Cain patently does not “dominate” his sinful impulses, which is how Rashi’s effortful reading would require us to read the text—it is worth wondering why he is so eager to rule out the most natural reading, which happens to be the reading that requires us to think, among other things, about the tortured dynamics of aggression, guilty shame, and tentative forgiveness between quarreling brothers.

  But then, who does not find ways to make the texts we deal with mean what we want them to mean?

  2

  THE SOUND OF YOUR BROTHER’S BLOOD

  BY THE TIME we drove into Bolechow, my brothers and sister and I, on that Sunday in August 2001, we had been in Eastern Europe for four days, and our mood was not good. We four siblings—Andrew, Matt, Jennifer, and I—were traveling together for the
first time since—when? I think it must have been 1967, during the famous “only” family vacation to Ocean City, Maryland, less famous in my mind for the inverted commas than for the fact that it was during that vacation that the final episode of the TV series The Fugitive aired, and even though I had begged my parents to make sure I was awake for the finale, they, thinking they knew best, let me sleep through it, with the result that I never did learn, or at least learn with a thoroughness of detail that satisfied me, the precise manner in which the true killer was revealed, never did see the satisfying moment in which the one-armed man was apprehended, the guilty party caught and the innocent victim finally, after so many years of being hunted, freed…I believe it had been that long, three and a half decades, since all of my parents’ children, or at least a significant percentage of us, had traveled together. We grew up in a modest split-level, my brothers and sister and I, the four boys sleeping two to a room; but since those days we have grown unused to being together in close quarters for any period of time.

  Because I am a classicist, I know that the word “intimate” comes from the Latin intimus, which is the superlative form of the adverb in, which means the same thing in Latin as it does in English—the comparative form being another familiar English cognate, interior. In, interior, intimus: inside, more inside, the most inside. I know that to many people who have families, these words will map out a self-evident emotional truth: that those who grow up in the same family will, because they shared the same inner space, interior, will feel closer, more intimate, to one another than perhaps to any other people, including their own spouses. But I also know, from my own and others’ experiences, that being so intimate, having too much access to what goes on inside those closest to you by blood—“inmost” is how my Latin dictionary defines intimus—will sometimes have an opposite reaction, causing family members to flee one another, to seek more—we use the literal and figurative terms interchangeably, these days—“space.”