The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  They spoke a perfect Yiddish? I asked, bemused. This man in Australia nodded and explained to me that sure, many of Bolechow’s Gentiles, Polish as well as Ukrainians, spoke perfect Yiddish: that’s how close they all had been.

  With a rueful grin he said, We were the first multiculturals.

  It seemed to me that behind the rue, the bitter disbelief of the people I talked to, to say nothing of the incredulity with which most people confront the fact that near neighbors can easily murder one another, given the right combination of circumstances—a thing that we have seen, of course, more recently than 1941—that behind the bitterness and disbelief there is an assumption, rather generic and perhaps optimistic, that it is harder to kill those to whom you are close than it would be to kill total strangers. But I am not so sure. The crook and the flail, the broken arm, the iron leg braces, the terrible forced marriage, I write to you saying that you’re out of your mind. The only time I ever had the boldness to ask my father why he’d stopped speaking to his brother, an annihilating silence that lasted the better part of my entire life, he replied, Sometimes it’s easier to deal with strangers.

  In, interior, intimus. Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It’s the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your pain or envy or, perhaps more than anything, your shame, who, at the crucial moment, can be too easy to cut out, to exile, to expel, to kill off.

  It is perhaps worth noting that our medieval commentator, Rashi, is more interested in explicating God’s famous question, “Where is Abel your brother?” whereas our modern commentator focuses on Cain’s equally famous reply, which he translates as “Am I my brother’s watchman?” Rashi wonders why the all-knowing God bothered to ask Cain a question the answer to which God must have known. Here once again, his primary interest is psychological rather than literary. Why does God question Cain? “To enter [into a conversation],” Rashi says, “with words of calm” as an inducement to the guilty brother: “Perhaps he would repent and say, ‘I killed him and sinned against You.’” For the French commentator of the Middle Ages, God’s question has nothing to do with curiosity—how could it?—but instead reflects a touching psychological nuance: God’s desire to give Cain a chance to admit his guilt. When I read this I am reminded that apart from being a great sage, Rashi was a parent.

  Friedman rightly refuses to render Cain’s words in their best-known form:“Am I my brother’s keeper?” He does so because the English word “watchman” nicely recapitulates a repeated motif in the Hebrew, which is an ongoing play in Genesis on the root of the word “watch,” sh-m-r. Thus man is placed in the Garden of Eden to work it and “watch over” it, ul’sham’rahu; after man’s fall, the cherubim are assigned to “watch over” (lish’m’or) the way to the Tree of Life; and later on, God promises to uphold his word to Abraham and his descendants because Abraham “kept my watch” (wayyish’mor). So the phrase is associated with loyalty—and, of course, disloyalty. It is in this context, Friedman argues, that we must understand Cain’s reply to God: “Now the first human to murder another questions cynically his responsibility to watch out for his brother.” It is only in the context of Genesis’s ongoing preoccupation with the idea of “watching over,” in other words, that we can fully appreciate the extent of Cain’s failure as a brother.

  AFTER WE TALKED to Olga and Pyotr, we left Bolechow and returned to L’viv. Because I felt we had gotten something concrete, something specific, and hence was satisfied, and because we were all feeling somewhat drained, I was almost afraid when, as we were getting into the car, a group of old Ukrainian women ambled past through the square and Alex, trying to be helpful, shouted across the grass to them, asking whether they’d known a family called Jäger. The women looked small, framed against a large, two-story house that, Alex told us, had undoubtedly once belonged to some Jews, as had most of the houses that fronted the Ringplatz. The three of them talked rapidly among themselves, and even from perhaps a dozen yards off we could see their silver dental crowns flashing. One of them, after consulting with the others, finally turned and shouted back at Alex, shrugging her arms in the universal gesture of innocent ignorance. She talked for a minute or so. Then Alex nodded to them and turned to us.

  They knew no one called Jäger, he said. They only remember one Jewish family called Zimmerman. It means something to you?

  No, I told him, I who knew the entire family history, the intricate genealogical trees; it meant nothing to us. We all got in the car, obscurely relieved, and started the drive back to L’viv.

  On the drive back we were all quiet, trying to absorb what we’d heard—the details that, at last, we had about what happened, even if they weren’t the specifics of what happened to our relatives—which, it must be said, suddenly seemed less vital to have, now that we knew what we knew. But once we returned to our hotel a reactive volubility set in, and we all sat in the hotel lounge and talked late into the night about what we had seen and heard. Then we went back to our rooms. The conversation I had that night with Andrew, after we returned to our room, was very different from the one we’d had the night before, when we were still anxious and irritated and worried that we’d find absolutely nothing once we actually got to Bolechow. The night before, we had lain in the narrow twin beds of our hotel room, venting our minor irritations with each other and with the other siblings, something Jen had said that annoyed me, Matt’s glum irritation with Andrew, and at some point Andrew had said, Maybe you just can’t have a relationship with siblings.

  Now, something indefinable had changed, and the air had cleared. Now we were excited. The trip to the town, the ebullience and hospitality of Nina, the translucent politeness of Maria, trying so hard to place a photograph of a face that, if she’d ever seen it, had disappeared off the earth two lifetimes ago, the cautious effusiveness of Olga and Pyotr—we had, after all, found something here; not exactly what we’d come for, perhaps, not that detailed: but we had made contact.

  And so, filled with renewed energy at last, we all decided that we’d go back the next day, too—not to do more interviews, since we doubted we’d find anyone else, but to see the cemetery, to make at least a token visit to the place where members of my family had been buried for three hundred years. We had no hope of finding specific graves. The headstones, we knew, would all be in Hebrew, eroded, and difficult to decipher; and besides, we knew that in these old Jewish cemeteries, family names were rarely used, since the custom was still the biblical one: here lies so-and-so, son or daughter of so-and so. And we knew, too, from an earlier visit Alex had made, that there were hundreds and hundreds of them. Another haystack; more needles. Still, we went.

  The hour-and-a-half drive from L’viv to Bolechow seemed shorter the next day; we were all in high spirits, still talking about our discoveries of the day before. Our luck had changed. And indeed, as we pulled up alongside the little creek that runs along one side of the ancient cemetery, Matt started shouting.

  Stop! Stop! Sima Jäger! Sima Jäger! he said, over and over, pointing off to the right.

  Over where he was pointing there was one solitary headstone, there at the top of the hill. It had Roman rather than Hebrew characters, and what they said was: SIMA JAGER. Because I had been studying these people since I was thirteen, I knew right away that this was my grandfather’s great-aunt. We parked the car and scrambled up the weedy hill. We spent a great deal of time there, photographing headstones, videotaping them, and as we left, I did what Jews do when they visit cemeteries, which is to put a rock on top of the tombstone. I found a rock and placed it on Sima’s headstone, and took some other rocks from that place, too, to put on my grandfather’s grave once we returned to New York. Off in the distance, over by the edge of the cemetery where the procession of listing stones came suddenly to a halt, blond Ukrainian children were swinging in an old rubber tire from the arm of a great old oak. They were beautiful children, and Matt, who more than anything loves photographing children—altho
ugh because of this trip, and the many others he and I would take together, for a long time he did nothing but photograph the very old—couldn’t resist pausing to take pictures of the towheaded, slender-faced boys and girls as they played among the graves of forgotten Jews. In one of these photographs, one of the boys has clambered atop a particularly large and solid-looking stone—clearly the monument of someone of no little stature. Long after we returned home, I noticed for the first time that the name on the stone was KORNBLUH. The inscription elaborates: it’s the grave of a girl who died before she could be wed…

  We stood there, watching Matthew take his pictures. The largish patch of earth over which the tire arced back and forth with its cargo of squealing children was subtly discolored and very hard, as if it had been tamped down on purpose, long ago.

  A notorious problem of translation arises in the Cain and Abel story. What the Hebrew actually says at one point is “the voice/sound your brother’s bloods are crying to me from the ground.” Because kol, “voice” or “sound,” is singular yet both the word for “blood,” d’mây, and the form of the verb “to cry out,” tso’akiym, are plural, a way must be found to resolve the two when translating God’s statement. One way, followed by most translators, is simply to ignore the grammar and to translate the sentence like this: “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying…” But this is clearly incorrect, since a singular noun, “voice,” cannot have a plural verb, “are crying.” The editors of Rashi’s commentary, in their own translation of this passage, convey the odd syntax while making sense of it: “the sound of your brother’s bloods, they cry out to Me from the ground!” In other words, the phrase “The sound of your brother’s bloods” becomes, essentially, a slightly jagged interjection, but still, strictly speaking, syntactically disconnected from the actual statement, which is that there are things that are crying from the ground. (Rashi, incidentally, explains the strange plural “bloods” in two ways, one rather figurative and the other quite literal. Rashi first thinks poetically: he imagines that the plurals refer to “his blood and the blood of his offspring.” He then thinks practically, the way a man would think who meant to do murder: “Alternatively, because [Cain] made in [Abel] many wounds, because he did not know from where his soul would depart.”)

  Friedman’s translation is far bolder and, I cannot help thinking, far more effective: “The sound! Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground!” Here, he makes no bones about wresting that disturbing singular noun, The sound! from the rest of the sentence entirely, so that it stands isolated as a pure exclamation of horror. The effect of this is twofold. First, it is both moving and somehow disturbing to think that the sound of blood shed in violence could be so terrible to hear that even God can react no more articulately than to cry out as a mere human might, as if clasping his hands to his ears: The sound! But what is really uncanny about this way of handling the strange Hebrew of the text is that is suggests, quite vividly, that even after it is shed, screams of innocent victims do not cease to issue from the earth where their blood was spilled.

  WE LEFT THE cemetery behind and walked back to the center of town. There, we stopped in front of the house that stands on the site of Shmiel’s house, to take some pictures. As we did so, a tall young Ukrainian, with the blond crew cut and icon’s long face that you see all over this area, emerged from the spacious house and asked us, not without a kind of aggressive suspiciousness, who we were and what we were doing. Again, Alex talked; again, the same story. And again, the unexpected welcome. The boy’s face—he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five—split into a huge grin, and he motioned us all inside.

  He says it’s a big honor, Alex said, not for the first time that day. He says, Please come in.

  And so once more we filed in, and the boy, whose name was Stefan, begged us to sit in the living room, where among the few decorations there was a modest reproduction of The Last Supper. He disappeared into the kitchen, and we overheard an urgent, whispered conversation between Stefan and his pretty blond wife, Ulyana. Soon after he emerged with a bottle of cognac and said something to Alex.

  He’s inviting you all for a drink, Alex explained. We all made polite noises of refusal, until it became clear that to refuse would be rude. We let him fill our glasses, and we drank. We drank toasts to my grandfather, who was born somewhere very near the spot we were sitting on; we drank toasts to America, and to Ukraine. It wasn’t even noon yet. The high emotion and extreme improbability of the long morning was beginning to take its toll; we were all a bit silly. Ulyana bustled in the kitchen, and before long Stefan emerged holding two dried whitefish by the tails, explaining to Alex that he wanted us to take them home with us. He insisted on another round, and again we drank toasts. Stefan said we all looked alike, and I replied that this certainly reflected well on the honor of our mother. Laughter, more toasts.

  Then, thinking of the long and spacious property outside, which ran a good ways down the road toward the church, and which had orchards of apple and plum and quince trees, too, I asked Alex to ask him how they’d come to live in this particular house. Stefan replied, with a smile, that it had belonged to his wife’s father, who’d acquired it after the war. From whom had his father-in law gotten it? we asked. The boy spread his hands in a gesture of bemusement, and smiled the same frowny smile that Maria had given us twenty-four hours earlier, when I’d asked about the castle.

  He doesn’t know, Alex said, although I already knew what nye znayu meant. Even if I hadn’t known that this towheaded boy with the long, high-boned face of a beautiful Orthodox icon was saying I don’t know, I’d have expected it anyway. No matter: if Olga was the closest in time that we’d come to what we were searching for, surely the half hour we spent in that house was the closest in space. On that very spot, they had all lived; and, for all we knew, died as well. It wasn’t until Sydney that we realized how wrong we were.

  As we walked outside toward the car, Stefan suddenly rushed up to us with a basket. It was filled with apples, tiny green unripe apples that he’d shaken from one of the trees. He held up the basket and thrust it in our direction, saying something to Alex.

  For your mother, Alex said. So she will have fruit from the house that would have been hers!

  It was a kind and touching gesture. But I knew that it wasn’t, in fact, the house where my family had lived and my grandfather had been born, hadn’t been the house where Shmiel wrote those letters. We had already been told that that one had been torn down, either during the war, at the Germans’ behest, or immediately afterward, to make way for the larger, more modern ones constructed by the Ukrainians who, freed at last from the Poles and the Jews who, some of them had always felt, had overshadowed them, oppressed them, exploited them, were, at least until their own turn came, finally the sole inhabitants of the town.

  When Cain’s crime is discovered, God announces his punishment: Cain, he says, will be more cursed than the earth that drank his brother’s blood; the earth will no longer be bountiful to him; he will wander the earth a perpetual exile. Much depends on whether we interpret Cain’s response to this dire news as a question or a statement. Does Cain declare, “My crime is greater than I can bear!” or does he wonder, “Is my crime greater than I can bear?” And is it “I shall be hidden from your presence” or “Shall I be hidden from your presence?” Friedman, writing for his modern audience, takes the text at face value—that is, as an abject statement: Cain has no idea how he will bear his guilt and his exile. Rashi, typically, worries about the hidden implications of the text.

  For Rashi, a chastened Cain is asking a resigned, rhetorical question that assumes a negative response: he knows well that no, his crime is not greater than he can bear, that he will be able, somehow, to endure his sin, since (as Rashi points out), if God bears “the higher realms and the lower realms,” how could it be that one man cannot bear his punishment? And he knows full well that no, he will not be hidden from God’s presence: for how, knowing God’s great powe
r, could he ever be hidden from God? (A question, of course, that begs the perhaps more difficult question of why, if no crime is hidden from God, God allows the crimes to be committed in the first place.) For many people it will be difficult not to prefer this older reading, because it suggests that, at least in retrospect, Cain realizes that however far off he might go, into whatever seemingly remote fields and hidden places, the criminal will still be seen by the eyes of God.

  THERE WAS ANOTHER house that had preoccupied me during our trip.

  This house, which is located in Striy, formerly Stryj, the small city between L’viv and Bolechow, still stood; the problem was finding it. It had belonged to Mrs. Begley, my friend’s mother, the one who kept correcting my pronunciation of the names of Polish towns. Despite my bad Polish accent, however, she was intrigued by my interest in her own vanished world, and soon after that first meeting, Mrs. Begley had me to tea at her apartment on the Upper East Side. At first she seemed skeptical about the intensity of my interest, but soon she was showing me things: old photographs, the Yizkor book from Stryj. She is not a sentimental woman—when she said not to bring any house gifts, that first time I went to her home for tea, in January 2000, and I brought a bunch of flowers, she was actually annoyed; or so it seemed then to me, who hadn’t yet learned to read her complicated signals—but she cried, a tiny bit, on that first Saturday at her house, when she was showing me the Yizkor book.

  Seventeen, she said, embarrassed and annoyed by her tears as she pointed to a blurry photograph of some vanished boy—a nephew, a cousin, I can’t remember now. Seventeen he was, he almost made it out.

  Then she made an impatient gesture and made me sit at the table, with its fresh white cloth and its dish of pickles, its tray of slices of black bread and lox, the white plate with its formations of cookies and pastries. Her maid, Ella, a soft blond Polish woman in, perhaps, her fifties, nervously approached with a teapot.