The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  So you knew him pretty well? I asked Boris Goldsmith.

  I knew him very well!

  And then I couldn’t think of anything to say. This was the strangeness of this trip: here I was at last, talking to people who had known them well, very well even, and I had no idea where to begin. I felt like someone confronted with a locked door who is handed a very large bunch of keys. I realized, then, how ill-prepared I had been. How do you find out who someone was, really? How do you describe a personality, a life? Fumbling, embarrassed, I turned to Boris Goldsmith.

  So what kind of person was he? I asked.

  Boris seemed taken aback.

  He was an ordinary person, he said, slowly. He was a butcher. He had two trucks. He used to go from Bolechow to Lwów.

  A butcher, the trucks, Lwów. This I knew, or could have guessed. I felt helpless.

  And you knew Ester? I said, fumbling.

  Oh yes…I used to come very often there. It was just across the street. I used to live there before he moved in there…

  He had lived just across the street from them! I remembered, at that moment, how precious the moment had been, eighteen months earlier, when we’d met Olga and Pyotr and she had said, Znayu, znayu, I knew them, I knew them. I hadn’t dreamed, then, that we’d ever get any closer. And now here I was, and all I could think of to ask was, Do you remember when he moved in?

  Boris shook his head apologetically and said, I don’t remember. It was a long, long time ago.

  The way he said a long, long time ago was the way you might begin, or maybe end, a fairy tale. The room went quiet. Boris started talking again.

  The house was there, he said. When he moved in he started to rebuild. He made it different. Then he bought two trucks, Studebakers. He was an expediter, he had a partner, his name was Schindler.

  I shot Matt a look. He flashed a grin at me, but said nothing.

  Boris went on, When the Russians came in ’thirty-nine, they took away his trucks, and then he was going in the country and buying cattles for the government.

  Cattles. My grandfather would have said it like this: kettles.

  Buying cattle for the government? I asked. This was interesting: I’d always wondered what became of Shmiel during the two years of Soviet rule, between 1939 and 1941.

  Bob interjected: For the government, because he was then an employee of the government.

  He was an employee of the government! Boris agreed, loudly. Yes, the Communists!

  It was only later on that I read the testimony of a survivor who’d written about the Soviet years: the liquidation and subsequent nationalization of all businesses; the unbearably high taxes, the disintegration of the Polish złoty and, hence, the sudden evaporation of all liquid wealth, the queues in the few stores that had goods. The sudden, late-night deportations to Siberia of “bourgeois counterrevolutionaries”—a blessing, as it turned out, in disguise. I read this and tried to imagine what going into the country and buying cattles for the government must have meant for Shmiel, who’d given up a life in the United States, all those years ago, to rebuild his family’s fortunes. The liquidation of the old family business, the seizure of the two Studebaker trucks, the appropriation by some minor Soviet official of the duties that had once belonged to the leader of the butchers’ cartel, and, finally, assignment to a humiliatingly menial job—although it was, at least, a job related to the business he had known so well. It wasn’t, in fact, until Boris said going into the country and buying cattles for the government that I had ever really thought of Shmiel as a butcher, as someone whose livelihood resided in animals, as had the livelihood of generations of his family. When I was a child and my grandfather would come to visit, he would, at some point during his stay, take me and, sometimes, my mother as well and drive my mother’s station wagon to the local shopping center where, nestled between a barbershop and a pharmacy, there was a kosher butcher store. This store, narrow and always unnervingly cold because of the low open cases that ran down one side and were filled with frozen plastic-wrapped packages of stuffed derma and liver, was run by a pair of brothers with whom, once we got there, my grandfather would spend a good deal of time chatting in Yiddish. I often wondered, then, why we almost always left the store without actually buying anything, and it was only when Boris said he was going into the country and buying cattles for the government that I realized that my grandfather used to go there not only to hear the sound of Yiddish, but to talk about meat, about his family business.

  SOMETHING OCCURRED TO me as Boris was talking. If Shmiel had, at some point, moved into a house across the street from Boris Goldsmith, then the house we had visited in Bolechow, the ancestral Jäger house on lot # 141, where Stefan and Ulyana now lived, was not, as I had assumed, the one in which Shmiel and his family had lived, and from which they had gone, however they had gone, to their deaths. Of this I wanted to be sure, and so I continued to question Boris.

  So when he moved in he already had the four girls—?

  Boris looked surprised. He had three girls, he said. I just remember three girls.

  Well, I said, there were four, but—

  I don’t think there were four. I don’t think so…

  Boris picked up the picture of Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia, which by then had circled the table and come to his place. I picked up some other photos and, leaning across the table, pointed.

  Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele, and Bronia, I said. At the opposite end of the table Meg Grossbard suddenly sat up.

  And Bronia! she said. Yes! She smiled.

  But Boris was unpersuaded. I just remember three of them, he insisted. I am positive he had just three daughters.

  At this point Sarah Greene smiled and said, Well, they know better, they were their family!

  Everyone laughed. I was afraid that in insisting on what I knew to be the truth, I had offended Boris by suggesting that his memory was faulty.

  Boris, for his part, abandoned the daughters and said, a little testily, He was a butcher. I don’t remember his relations.

  Do you remember he had a brother who went to Palestine? I asked.

  I don’t know his brother, Boris said crisply. Just that he once had a family.

  TO CHANGE THE subject, I asked everybody if there had been other Jägers in Bolechow. My grandfather had said that he had cousins who had lived in town, when he was a boy—Jäger cousins, I assumed, who had been related to his aunt Sima, the one whose headstone I had so improbably come across in the Bolechow cemetery.

  That’s what I asked Jack just now, Mrs. Grossbard said, turning in my direction. There were Jägers in the rynek. They were uncles of Dusia Zimmerman…they were her mother’s brothers. Her mother was a Jäger. They had a sweet shop, a cukierna.

  She turned to Jack and, in Polish, asked him how to render cukierna in English. Sarah Greene said, A coffeehouse?

  Meg held up a manicured hand. No, no, no, no, she said.

  This quadruple no was, as I would learn during the course of the day, a habit of hers when she was irritated by the inaccuracies of others. Her voice was tight and humorless.

  Not a coffeehouse, I’m sorry, she said. We didn’t have coffeehouses.

  Everyone laughed, and whether it was at Meg’s irritation, or at the absurdity that a little shtetl like Bolechow offered the likes of a coffeehouse, I was unable to tell.

  I knew Frydka all my life, Meg told me. The last time I saw her was in ’forty-one when we could still walk the streets. And then I don’t know what happened to her. I have no idea. But Lorka I met in January or February ’forty two, in another girlfriend’s place, because there was her boyfriend.

  I am used to the twists and turns of English syntax when it’s filtered through Polish, but I wasn’t sure who “her” referred to.

  Whose boyfriend was there? I asked Meg.

  Lorka’s boyfriend, she replied. Yulek Zimmerman was his name. That was the last time I saw her, because Yulek had a younger sister that we were friends with, me and Frydka.

&nb
sp; She explained: Early in 1942, before the Jews of Bolechow were no longer permitted to walk the streets, Meg had gone to this Zimmerman house to see her friend Dusia Zimmerman, and when she got there Dusia’s older brother, Yulek, was there, with Lorka Jäger, his girlfriend.

  So she had a boyfriend, I thought.

  As Meg lingered over this story, which she would tell me again a few days later, when I finally got to visit with her and old Mr. Grossbard—not, as it turned out, without some difficulty—I tried to think of why the name Zimmerman was ringing a bell. And then I remembered: on our last day in Bolechow a year and a half earlier, some old women had told us that they didn’t know anyone called Jäger but they’d known a family called Zimmerman; but I hadn’t wanted to stop and talk to them because people called Zimmerman had nothing to do with us.

  I ASKED MEG, So you knew her since you were a small girl? Meaning Frydka.

  Oh yes, we grew up together.

  So did you know the other sisters at all?

  She made a face. Of course, she said. The little one I didn’t know so much because she was small, but the others…

  Her voice trailed off and she smiled sadly. I was very often at their place, she said after a moment. They were lovely, they were friendly. It was a very lovely home. Very warm, very friendly.

  After a moment she added, It was one story, but spacious. It was painted white, I recall.

  Again I was bewildered and frustrated—angry with myself, in a way. She had known them so well, and I couldn’t begin to think what kinds of questions might tease, from out of her memory, a living sense of what this vanished family had been like. I asked Mrs. Grossbard about Ester. We knew nothing whatsoever about her, I told her.

  I mean—she shrugged—how would you like me to describe her? She was hospitable, she was friendly, and…I mean…I can’t tell you any more, because life…

  Everyone was silent for a moment, and then Sarah Greene intervened with a laugh. She said, She was probably like all the other Jewish mothers!

  Meg reacted. I had noticed, by now, that she didn’t like other people to have the last word; like everyone—like me, too, of course—she wanted control of her own story.

  No, no, no, no, she said. She was very friendly, she had a cheerful personality. The father I haven’t seen very much because he was seldom at home, but the mother, she was always at home.

  Like all the other Jewish mothers gave me an idea. What if I started thinking about them as if they were just ordinary people instead of sepia icons? I decided to try to provoke Mrs. Grossbard.

  You know, I said to her, you knew these girls when they were girls but also when they were teenagers. So did they have good relationships with the parents, did they complain about them?

  She seemed confused, as if she couldn’t quite grasp what I was after.

  Look, she said to me, slowly, we were very young when the war broke out…

  Yes, I thought, I know. The Polish State Archives had sent me a copy of Frydka’s birth certificate. October 22, 1922. She was not quite seventeen when the war started, not quite nineteen when the Soviets retreated and the Germans came. Twenty-one, probably, when she died—if it was true that she had gone into the forest to join the Babij partisans in 1943, which of course there was no way of knowing with any certainty. I knew they had all been young when the war broke out, these girls, but I had a very faint sense, the instant when Meg retreated from talking about Frydka as a teenager, that she was doing so because the subject of Frydka as a teenager might lead to another subject that she was even less willing to discuss.

  As it turned out, I was right.

  Just then Bob Grunschlag interrupted. Who would dare to complain against their parents?! he said, grinning.

  Everyone laughed. As people chuckled, I overheard Meg talking across the table to Jack in a low voice. She was saying: I don’t recall exactly when Frydka—she was with Tadzio Szymanski? She was with Tadzio?

  Between my ignorance of Polish personal names, at that point, and the way she pronounced those last four words, which to my ear sounded like she wass wiss stadziu, it was impossible for me to tell exactly what the name was.

  I asked who was this Stadzio or Tadzio Szymanski.

  No, no, no, no, Meg immediately said. Her voice was firm; she must have been a formidable young woman, I thought. Then she adjusted her tone, lightening her voice to make it seem that this was someone of no great significance.

  Frydka was friendly with someone, you wouldn’t know, but Jack would know. Meg looked, at that moment, right past Bob, to whom she said, You know nothing.

  Then Jack turned to Meg and said, correcting her, Ciszko Szymanski.

  Meg nodded Yes. Ciszko, she repeated.

  To my ear it sounded like Chissko. Again I asked what they were talking about.

  No, no, no, no. Nothing.

  Nothing?

  Jack said, I was trying to remember some boy, some non-Jewish boy.

  Meg looked irritated.

  Somebody was going out with a non-Jewish boy? I asked.

  Now wait, Meg said. No, no, no, no. This is not to be in the records.

  Jack laughed and pointed at me. See, he said, you’re learning some things here!

  Everyone laughed except Meg. I had the feeling, which was, as often happens with these intuitions, at once vague but unmistakable, that I had tripped onto an old, controversial piece of gossip.

  Meg looked at me and said, You know that American comedy, where he says “I know NUSSSSink”? Of course I knew: Hogan’s Heroes, the jolly Nazi POW-camp sitcom from the Sixties, one of whose characters was the obese Corporal Schultz, who although he invariably was a party to the adorable antics of the American POWs, would always insist to his Kommandant that he was innocent, that he hadn’t seen anything. I know NUSS-ink! he would cry, a line always played for laughs.

  Well, Meg went on, when I’d nodded that yes, I knew that American comedy, I know nussss-ink!

  But this wasn’t television. This wasn’t a comedy. The story that she wanted to keep from me was the whole reason I’d flown nine thousand miles to talk to her.

  So Frydka liked this boy and he wasn’t Jewish, I persisted.

  I don’t know, I wasn’t there, Meg said.

  It would have been a big deal, no? I said.

  Bob, gleeful at having an opportunity to tease her, leaned in again. It would have been a very big deal, he said. This drew a sour smile from Meg.

  That’s an understatement. The understatement of the year, she murmured. But still she refused to confirm, in so many words, that Frydka Jäger had liked this Polish Catholic boy a lifetime ago, when such a romance would have been a very big deal; although now who really cared? My brother Andrew’s wife isn’t Jewish; Matt’s wife is Greek Orthodox. I wondered, for a split second during this exchange, what he was thinking about this revelation.

  Meg stonewalled. I don’t know, I didn’t witness it.

  I’m not asking you to witness it, I said, half joking. But she was your best friend, she must have been confiding in you?

  Meg sighed. No, no, this was happening during the war. Not before. Heavens forbid!

  I made a mental note of how she said Heavens, plural.

  Nothing like this could have happened before the war, she explained.

  This, of course, was as good as an admission. At that moment, Frydka, who until now had been a child’s face on a photograph or two, began to assume an emotional form, to have a story. So she had liked some Polish boy, I thought to myself with a smile, and he had liked her back.

  And thinking that this was the story, a story that even as I heard it there, for the first time, I was preparing in my mind for subsequent retellings to my mother, her cousins, my siblings, when I got home, I leaned back in my chair and decided to change the subject for a while before I really alienated Mrs. Grossbard, who was looking unhappy. It was just then that Jack, leaning in from the end of the table and raising his voice, said, Let me tell you something. That boy lost
his life because of Frydka.

  Wait, I said. I’m sorry?

  Jack lowered his voice. Everyone else at the table had stopped talking and turned to him. He looked at me and started talking again. Pausing for emphasis between each word, he went on, and what he said was this:

  The. Boy. Lost. His. Life. Because. Of. Her.

  There was a moment’s silence.

  What do you mean? I said.

  Well, you see, he began, these three girls were in Babij, the partisan group, because three Polish boys befriended them. Three Bolechower girls. Frydka, the other one was Dunka Schwartz, and the third one was…the sister of the two boys who survived with the Babijs, Ratenbach.

  I had no idea who these people were, but I didn’t interrupt. I wanted him to go on.

  These three boys befriended the girls, he went on, they helped the girls to get to the forest where were the Babij. It was a forest near Dolina, there were about four hundred Jews who were part of the partisans.

  I nodded: he’d begun to tell me this story a year ago, on the phone.

  Then of course we went to the forest ourselves, he went on, Bob and my father and I. So we lost track. When we came back, we were told that these three boys were—

  He gestured vigorously with the flat of his right hand toward the side of the table, as if to demarcate a certain geographical area over there.

  —were brought out in a field in Bolechow, he went on, and were shot.

  Because they helped the girls, I said.

  Because they helped the girls, he repeated.

  And I thought, Now this is a story.

  AS IT TURNED out, I wouldn’t get the rest of the story of Frydka and Ciszko until I had traveled further: to Israel, to Stockholm, to Copenhagen. That afternoon, in Sydney, we didn’t return to the subject of Frydka and Ciszko Szymanski, because it was clear that Mrs. Grossbard wasn’t going to talk anymore if we pressed the subject. So instead I asked them all to clarify the chronology of the Nazi occupation.