The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  So I secretly hoped. If things went well with this Mrs. Grossbard, I thought to myself, I would find a way to persuade her to let me talk to her brother-in-law.

  AS WE WAITED for Meg’s arrival, we all sat down at Jack and Sarah’s dining table, laid with its lacy cloth. On it Sarah had placed many cups and plates, ready for coffee and cake; when Meg arrived, we would begin to eat, and to talk. In the meantime Jack looked through the photographs I’d brought, both old family pictures and pictures of our trip to Bolechow.

  You know, he said, we used to have Yiddish nicknames for every town in the area.

  Nicknames? I repeated.

  Sure, Jack said. (He used the word emphatically and often, as he also used That’s right, a phrase he tended to utter with a slight Polish inflection, det’s rhight, while giving an emphatic downward nod of his head.)

  For instance, Jack went on, you would say someone was a Bolechower krikher, it meant crawler.

  Krowler.

  Why? I asked.

  Because you had to crawl around—there were so many streets and neighborhoods! He smiled, amused by this memory.

  So many neighborhoods? I repeated. I was confused, since I’ve always thought of Bolechow as tiny. When we had been there, my brothers and sister and I, it seemed to consist of little more than the Rynek, the big square; the road leading in from Striy to the north; and the road leading out toward the cemetery. As is would turn out, we had seen very little of the town. There was in fact much more.

  Sure, Jack said. For instance, he explained, there was a nice area of Bolechow—he was looking at a photograph as he said this, one of the snapshots from our Ukraine trip two years earlier—which we called the German Colony. There was a German Colony, an Italian Colony. There was a neighborhood called Bolechow Ruski.

  Matt and I both looked at each other and laughed at the thought of there being “colonies” in this tiny shtetl, and Jack laughed, too.

  Yeah, we were big-time Charlies! he crowed. The way he pronounced Charlies, as if it were spelled “chollies,” reminded me so vividly of my grandfather that for a minute I couldn’t say anything.

  Jack went on. Take Lwów, he said. It was called Lemberger pipick. He grinned.

  Pipick? Pipick is the Yiddish word for navel.

  Yes, he said. Because it had a square, a rynek, right in the middle, it was like a belly button! Dolina you called Dolina hoise. Hoise, it’s a pair of pants. Because it had only two streets, it looked like a pair of pants!

  He stopped for a moment. I had long known the names of these towns, and had for a long time thought of them as nothing more than destinations, as places matched to certain dates, or certain people on my family tree. Now, suddenly, they seemed to have some life, because I could imagine them through the eyes of people who had lived there, who had these silly, affectionate nicknames for them.

  At the moment that Jack was explaining about Dolina hoise, the doorbell rang and Mrs. Grossbard walked in.

  SHE WAS NOT what I expected. Tiny but ramrod-straight, her auburn hair, with its expensive copper highlights, swept back in an impeccable and clearly expensive coiffure, she exuded an air that was at once crisp and distant. She was wearing dark colors that highlighted her brilliant hair: a black silk blouse, a violet sweater. Large gold earrings adorned her long lobes. Jack kissed her on each cheek as she strode in.

  This is Daniel Mendelsohn, he said, pointing me out; and then, pointing to Matt, he smiled and said, And this is also Mr. Mendelsohn.

  I’m so pleased to meet you, I said. My mother is Frydka’s cousin.

  Yes, she said, walking past me and seating herself at the table, where she immediately picked up some photographs, I know. Unsmiling, she abruptly started looking through the pictures Matt had taken during our trip to Ukraine: an ancient crone in L’viv, leaning out of a doorway in which you can just make out a groove for the mezuzah that had once been affixed there; an old man in the little square in Bolechow, holding a goat by a leash.

  As I stood there trying to think of what to say, I noticed that the air of gentle reminiscence that has characterized the first fifteen minutes of this strange reunion had become charged. Clearly I wasn’t the only one whom Meg Grossbard put on edge. I wondered what private histories, dating sixty years back, lay beneath the polite greetings being uttered by the others at that moment. Six months later, I would find out.

  Because I was already a little afraid of her—this woman on whom I had to depend to rescue Frydka from total obscurity, and yet who was clearly already resistant in some undefinable but palpable way—I found myself instinctively trying to appease her, the way that, when I was a boy, I would try to appease my grandfather’s fourth and last wife, that difficult and unsmiling woman with the tattoo on her arm, of whom we were all afraid. So when Mrs. Grossbard turned to me, pulling a photograph from a plastic bag and handing it to me, a posed studio shot of Frydka in which the pretty, long-dead girl is wearing a babushka and very barely smiling, an image I had never seen before and which looks strikingly like my mother—when Mrs. Grossbard turned to me and said, That is Frydka Jäger, I stupidly replied, as if to confirm something she considered important, That’s my mother’s cousin. She looked at me, not smiling, and said, Yes I know, she was my girlfriend, with just the barest, proprietary emphasis on the word “my.”

  She returned to her bag. I have only a few group photos of Frydka, she said. She explained that they weren’t hers. They had belonged, she said, to a girlfriend of hers and Frydka’s, a young woman called Pepi Diamant.

  Di-AH-mant.

  She perished, but her album survived, Mrs. Grossbard said, tonelessly. I found her album after the war, when I came back to Bolechow, and I took some—her pictures, my pictures, Frydka’s pictures.

  I knew that what she meant was: pictures of Pepi, pictures of Meg, pictures of Frydka. (Pepi’s nickname, it became clear that afternoon, had been Pepci, pronounced PEP-shuh.) Oddly, Meg did not offer any of these miraculously preserved photos to me to look at just yet. I could just barely glimpse, through the plastic, snapshots of groups of girls: in summer frocks, posed in front of garden gates; in swimming costumes at the water’s edge; in wasp-waisted winter jackets, standing on skis.

  Across the table, Boris Goldsmith, squeezed between Jack Greene and Bob Grunschlag, was looking through more photographs; they were all clearly waiting for the group interview to begin. Ignoring them, Mrs. Grossbard went on. She said, I saw Frydka for the last time—this was when we were still able to walk around freely—in February ’forty-two. The last time…

  Her voice trailed off. Suddenly she stopped short and looked right at me for the first time. You look very Aryan, she said, slightly accusingly.

  I was taken aback. I do? I said, half in amusement.

  Yes, Meg shot back. It’s very important, you know. We have a little thing about it, all of us. Because someone who looked like you had a chance to live.

  I was unable to think of any adequate response to this, so instead I took out a photograph that had belonged to my grandfather, a picture in which Shmiel, white-haired and tired-looking, and Ester, stout and big-bosomed in a print dress, stand protectively on either side of Bronia, who looks to be about ten. I put the photograph on the table in front of Meg Grossbard, and she picked it up tenderly. For the first time the hardness, the resistance, seemed to dissolve, and Meg Grossbard, nodding softly, said quietly, Yes. That was her parents.

  And—also for the first time—she smiled.

  MUCH ELSE WAS to happen that day, a great deal would be learned about Shmiel and his family; but when I think about our strange journey to Australia, it is that moment I dwell on. How casually we rely on photographs, really; how lazy we have become because of them. What does your mother look like? someone will want to know; and you’ll say, Wait, I’ll show you, and run to a drawer or an album and say, Here she is. But what if you had no photographs of your mother, or anyone in your family—indeed, even of yourself before a certain age? How would you explain
what she, they, you, looked like? I never really thought about this until I talked to Meg Grossbard that Sunday afternoon, and realized how casual, even thoughtless I was being, traveling around the world talking to these survivors, who had survived with literally nothing but themselves, and showing them the rich store of photographs that my family had owned for years, all those photographs I had stared at and, later, dreamed about when I was growing up, images of faces that, for me, had no real emotional meaning at all in and of themselves, but which to the people to whom I was now showing them had the power to recall, suddenly, the world and the life from which they’d been torn so long ago? How stupid, how insensitive I had been. At the moment Mrs. Grossbard said That was her parents, I realized that she wasn’t merely confirming the identity of the people in the photograph; I realized that what she was saying, in a way, was that she was laying eyes on faces she hadn’t seen, hadn’t dreamed of being able to see, in sixty years, faces that could summon her own lost girlhood to her. These were the parents of my friend. I imagined that it must seem unfair to her to have this young American man intervene in her life, suddenly, fanning out photographs of people he never knew as if they were cards in a deck and asking her to pick one, photographs of her girlfriend’s parents, when she had no photographs of her own parents to look at. And so the picture that I showed her that Sunday, a picture I’d seen countless times since I was a boy, brought home to me for the first time the strangeness of my relationship to the people I was interviewing, people who were rich in memories but poor in keepsakes, whereas I was so rich in the keepsakes but had no memories to go with them.

  The significance of pictures—the way in which an image that is, essentially, entertainment for one person can unexpectedly be profoundly emotional, even traumatic for another—is the subject of one of the most famous passages in all of classical literature. In Vergil’s epic poem, the Aeneid, a poem not without significance for survivors of cataclysmic annihilations, the hero, Aeneas, is a young Trojan prince, one of the few survivors of the destruction of Troy (the Trojan War being the subject of Homer’s Iliad, with its swirling, ringlike anecdotes). His city destroyed, his civilization in ruins, virtually all of his friends and relatives murdered, Aeneas travels the world seeking a place to settle and begin again. That place would, eventually, be Rome, the city that he founds; but before the traumatized Aeneas gets to Rome, he stops first at a city called Carthage, in North Africa, which (as we learn in Book I of the Aeneid) was itself founded by a hunted, desperate exile: a woman called Dido, with whom Aeneas will soon fall in love and, later, abandon, breaking her heart. When Aeneas and a companion first arrive in the bustling new town, they stroll around admiring its newly erected buildings and monuments. Suddenly, in a magnificent new temple, the two men stop dead in their tracks in front of a mural that is decorated with pictures of the Trojan War. For the Carthaginians, the war is just a decorative motif, something to adorn the walls of their new temple; for Aeneas, of course, it means much more, and as he stands looking at this picture, which is a picture of his life, he bursts into tears and utters a tormented line of Latin that would become so famous, so much a part of the fabric of Western civilization, that it turns up, really, everywhere: as the name of a musical group and the title of a musical work; as the name of Web sites and blogspots, of a science-fiction fantasy novel, the title of a newspaper story, of a scholarly book. What Aeneas says, as he looks at the worst moment of his life decorating the wall of a shrine in a city of people who do not know him and had no part in the war that destroyed his family and his city, is this: sunt lacrimae rerum, “There are tears in things.”

  This, in any event, is the line that came to my mind when Meg said, Those were her parents, and which would continue to come to my mind whenever I was confronted with the awful discrepancy between what certain images and stories meant for me, who was not there and for whom, therefore, the images and stories could never be more than interesting or edifying or fiercely “moving” (in the way that you say a book or a film is “moving”); and what they meant for the people I was talking to, for whom those images and stories were, really, their lives. In my mind, that Latin half-line became a kind of caption for the poignantly unbridgeable distances created by time. They were there, and we were not. There are tears in things; but we all cry for different reasons.

  SHE PERISHED, BUT her album survived. As Mrs. Grossbard said this, with the slightest accent of irony, a tone I came to recognize as characteristic over the next few days, I was reminded of a story about photographs and their survival that Mrs. Begley had told me once during one of my visits to her place. She’d been trying to describe to me what she had once looked like, and what her mother had looked like, too. This was the visit during which she’d told me how she’d tried to rescue her parents and in-laws, only to see their bodies being carted away as she arrived at the rendezvous.

  A real Rebecca, she had said, a real Jewish beauty. How can I explain?

  At this, she took her stick in one hand and, bracing the other arm against the arm of her straight-backed chair, rose slowly to her feet. Painstakingly, she moved toward her bedroom and without saying anything beckoned to me to follow. She stopped in front of a dresser. Out in the living room, I had noticed many times, there were dozens of photographs of her son, his children, their children, pictures that crammed every available shelf and tabletop. In here, in the bedroom, on top of the spotless dresser, were a handful of very old-looking photographs. One by one, she picked them up and, passing each one briefly into my hands before taking it back and carefully replacing it on the dresser, told me who the subject was of each: her mother, her father, to be honest I can’t remember now because that day, in 2002, I knew I’d have many opportunities to look at them and enquire about them and hence didn’t look at them intently enough or listen to her meticulously enough, and now when I try to summon them to mind I have a vague impression of a picture of an attractive woman in a fur stole, and a very, very old picture of a distinguished, unsmiling old man in black who could have been a rabbi, or perhaps was merely wearing one of the round, vaguely Oriental caps that adult men of a certain vintage and era used to wear as a matter of course.

  But I did listen with great interest to the story of how she came to repossess these ancient family photographs from her girlhood in Rzeszów and Kraków, since I had wondered how it was that she’d managed to keep them after she’d fled her comfortable house on Third of May Street, the house that had then been appropriated for use as Gestapo headquarters. Had she hidden them somehow on her person, I asked after she put the last photograph neatly back in its place, had she concealed them in the lining of a coat, for instance, as she fled, disguised, with her small child in tow, from hiding place to hiding place, alias to alias?

  Mrs. Begley looked at me. Achhh, she said, Of course not, do you think I was crazy? I’ll tell you what happened.

  We slowly made our way back to the living room. She lowered herself again into the chair, and then she told me the story: how, after the war was over, after she’d been reunited with her husband, the big doctor from Stryj who, like so many doctors, was taken east when the Soviets retreated in 1941, she was contacted by someone who’d come to live in her former house, the house I had tried and failed to locate the summer before.

  He told me he had found a bunch of my photographs, she said, and if I wanted them, I could send money to such-and-such an address.

  She grimaced, although her expression was not without some humor.

  So I did it for a while, I would send money and he would send a photo, two photos.

  I didn’t say anything. I was trying to imagine how much I would pay to ransom my past.

  But finally my husband got angry, he was sick of it, and I stopped.

  She paused for a moment as her eyes lighted on the shelves of pictures of Louis and his family.

  And you see that now I have many pictures, she said.

  AT JACK GREENE’S, the picture of Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia started t
o loosen tongues, and the conversation about my lost great-uncle and his family became, suddenly, boisterous and somewhat disorderly. For so many years, we had known nothing about them, which was frustrating. Now I found myself frustrated in quite the opposite way, because I wasn’t able to hear everything at once. Not knowing whom I should talk to first, where to put the microphone of my tape recorder, half-hearing scraps of conversations coming from all sides, I turned to Matt with an anguished expression, as these four old Bolechowers chattered to one another, and I said, I’m losing all this.

  Jack Greene was saying, I remember the Jägers, I remember Shmiel Jäger, I remember Itzhak Jäger—you know he went to Palestine in the 1930s?

  Yes, I said, I knew. Itzhak, Shmiel’s brother, the brother who, my mother told me at some point, was the sibling to whom her father had been closest, the one he’d loved the most, Itzhak who had been dragged with his two small children from Bolechow to the Middle East by his ardent Zionist wife. On the opposite side of the table, Boris Goldsmith was smiling and trying to make himself heard.

  I remember, Boris said, he had the first radio in town. It was big—raising both hands he sketched a big box—with a big aerial.

  The r of “aerial” was lodged high up in back of his throat, where the uvula hangs—precisely where my grandfather would have placed it.

  It was very high, the aerial, Boris said. You couldn’t hear it, even…He also had the first telephone.

  The first radio, the first telephone. A big fish in a small pond. As Boris told this story, which I prized because it fit an idea of Shmiel that I already had in mind, fragments of another story about appliances and status glimmered at the edges of my memory, although it wasn’t until I returned home and called my mother that I recalled precisely what it had been. My father bought Uncle Itzhak and Aunt Miriam the first refrigerator anyone had in Haifa, my mother said over the phone. They didn’t have a refrigerator, and when they finally got electric lines through to this place where they lived, my father thought they should have a fridge, and he had one sent over. Itzhak and Miriam were the talk of the town! But that afternoon in Australia, I couldn’t remember this story.