The people were kept in this way from 28 to 29 October without food or water until 16.00. At 16.00, they were all taken by car to the woods in Taniawa, 8– 10 km from Bolechów. About 800 people were shot there. There was a board over a ditch onto which people were forced and they were shot and fell into the grave; some were badly injured others only just slightly. Ducio Schindler escaped from there in the evening. He climbed a tree and waited out the whole execution and filling in of the grave. He told us everything. On the next day, 30 October 1941, Commissioner Köhler ordered the Judenrat [the all-Jewish governing council, appointed by the Nazi authorities to act as intermediaries between the Germans and the Jewish community and to carry out their orders] to clean up the hall of the Dom Katolicki, to take the 29 bodies to the cemetery.
The Gestapo demanded payment for the ammunition expended. The Judenrat had to pay. Beyond that, they forced them to pay 3 kg. of granular coffee for labour expenses.
So now it is possible to know what happened, even if it is difficult to reconstruct with any certainty what happened to Ruchele. She was picked up, most likely, sometime after noon on Tuesday, the twenty-eighth of October, as she walked the streets of her hometown with her girlfriends. She was then herded toward the Dom Katolicki, and there probably witnessed certain of the events described above—although we must keep in mind that the Jews who were forced onto the floor of the D.K. that afternoon were told to keep their heads down, and that those who got up off the floor were often shot dead on the spot, so maybe it’s better, instead of saying that Ruchele witnessed some of what happened, to say that she mostly heard shots, screams, shouts, taunts, the piano playing, the footfalls of the awkwardly dancing feet on the stage.
It is possible (to go on) that the sixteen-year-old Ruchele was killed there, as we know some people were. It is, indeed, possible that she was the naked girl on the stage, with whom the rabbi, his eyes running blood, was forced to dance, or forced to lie on top of. I prefer not to think so. Then again, if she survived those thirty-six hours, as some did not, we know that at around four o’clock on the afternoon of October 29, a Wednesday, after spending the previous day, night, and morning in a state of terror that it would be foolish to try to imagine; after weeping with thirst and hunger and, undoubtedly, soiling herself with her own urine, for nobody can go a day and a half without relieving herself, she was then taken, exhausted, hungry, terrified, filthy with her own bodily fluids, something it is hard, perhaps even embarrassing to think about, a disgusting, deeply shaming experience for any adult, but a possibility I must consider, as I try to imagine what happened to her; she was taken to Taniawa—whether she walked the few kilometers or was put in a truck, it is impossible to know—and there, after waiting in even greater terror while watching group after group of her neighbors, people she’d seen around the little town her whole life long (well: sixteen years) line up on a plank and fall into the pit: after watching this, she took her inevitable turn, walked naked onto the plank—with what thoughts it is impossible to know, although it would be difficult not to imagine that she was thinking, in those last moments, of her mother and father and sisters, of home; but perhaps ( you’re a sentimental person, Mrs. Begley had once told me, in part dismissively and in part indulgently), perhaps for the most fleeting moment, she thought of Jakob Grünschlag, the boy whom she’d dated for a year and a half, his dark hair and eager smile—and standing on the plank, or perhaps at the edge of the freshly dug pit, with the bodies beneath her and the cold October air above, waited. The cold October air: we know that she was naked by this point, and between the weather and the terror, surely she was shivering. Again and again, as she waited her turn—unless she was the first?—the sounds of machine-gun fire rang out. (This was not the death that people came, in time, to hope for, if it was their bad luck to be caught. The shot to the back of the neck, what did they call it in German—the “mercy shot”? Mrs. Grossbard had asked no one in particular, the day all the Bolechowers gathered. She made a gun with her hand and pointed to the back of her own neck. I can’t think of it. When I am upset I can’t remember things.)
So: the rattling bursts of gunfire, the cold, the shivering. At some point it was her turn, she walked with the others onto the plank. Likely this plank had some give, perhaps it bounced a little as they lined up: an incongruously playful motion. Then another burst of fire. Did she hear it? Was the fervent activity of her mind at this moment such that she didn’t really hear; or, by contrast, were her ears exquisitely attuned, waiting? We cannot know. We know only that her soft, sixteen-year-old body—which with any luck was lifeless at this point, although we know that some were still alive when they fell with a wet thud onto the warm and bleeding, excrement-smeared bodies of their fellow townsfolk—fell into the grave, and that is the last we see of her; although we have, of course, not really seen her at all.
AND ALL THIS happened most likely because she had left her house and gone for a walk to meet her little group, the three school friends, late the previous morning.
Only one-sixth of the Jewish population perished that day, Jack told us. (Only.) But three-quarters of those four girls perished that day.
I noticed, not for the first time, that the verb Jack invariably uses of those who were killed is perish, which, to my ear, lent a slightly elevated, perhaps biblical flavor to his conversation when he would discuss those who did not survive the war. Kill and dead are Germanic words; the clipped finality of those brief monosyllables—in German as in English, Tod as well as dead—leaves, as it were, no room for argument. Perish, on the other hand, from the Latin verb pereo, the literal meaning of which is “to pass through,” feels more ample; it always suggests to me a realm of possibilities far beyond the mere fact of death—a feeling that’s confirmed by a glance at the entry in the rather old Latin dictionary I own: To pass away, come to nothing, vanish, disappear, be lost; To pass away, be destroyed, perish; To perish, lose life, die…To be lost, fail, be wasted, be spent in vain; To be lost, be ruined, be undone. Given what I know, now, after talking to all the Bolechowers now alive, I have come, myself, to prefer perish over all other verbs, when I speak of those who died.
Three-quarters of those four girls perished that day, Jack had said.
And so you knew, I said.
He paused for a moment.
Well, he said, they knew…I remember. Father was in Judenrat—my father was a member of the Judenrat, so I asked him what happened to the Jäger family, so he told me, One girl perished. And then I found out it was Ruchele.
This he told me when all of the Bolechowers were gathered at his dining table. The next day, when Matt and I returned to Jack’s home to interview him alone, he told me a slightly different version of this story.
The Aktion took place on the Tuesday, he said. And Tuesday night my father arrived home. He was in the Judenrat. They had taken away Mother from home, but my father was away in the Judenrat. He thought they’d take him, so he ran away and arrived that night to our home. So you know, I don’t know whether that evening or the next morning, I started to ask him, Whom did they take? I asked, What about the Jägers? And he said, One of the Jägers’ girls. So I asked, Which one? And he didn’t know, he didn’t know or he wouldn’t tell me—I don’t even know if they knew I was dating her. And two or three days later they sent me to my aunt’s house—you know, I took it bad, losing my mother and my brother.
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
So I went to stay with my aunt for a few days. So I remember in the evening—maybe in the afternoon, maybe in the evening, at night—I came to ask, One of the Jäger girls they took—which one? And they said, Ruchele. So it hit me again. I didn’t sleep that night, I remember my aunt didn’t know why, she thought that I was still…after the death of my mother…
He fell silent for a moment, then went on.
I remember every hour, every hour and a half, my aunt came into the room where I was in bed and said, You’re still not asleep, you’re still not asleep? A
t the time I was thinking of Ruchele, because it was a new shock.
What Shmiel and Ester and their three remaining daughters, for whom the fate of Ruchele was, until then, the greatest catastrophe of their lives, went through in the days following the first Aktion in Bolechow will never be known. (Although we do know that Shmiel, who was still alive in 1941, would have had to contribute money when the Judenrat ordered a collection of funds early in November of that year, which meant that, however indirectly, he had to pay for the bullet or bullets that had ended his third daughter’s life.) But now I do know this: that very briefly, a long time ago in the house of Jack Greene’s aunt, Ruchele had mattered very much to someone else, and when I considered this, as Jack went on talking to me, I was happy.
You see, I had known one of the girls perished, he repeated, but I didn’t know which one.
This, as it turned out, was the last thing anybody ever said to me about Ruchele Jäger.
The murder of innocent children is a notorious problem that arises in the text of parashat Noach. Parashat Bereishit, a tale ostensibly about Creation, ends with God’s disgusted awareness that “the wickedness of man was great upon the earth,” a realization that leads him—there has been much excited comment on this notion—to “regret” having made humankind to begin with. (“What could this mean?” Friedman asks. “If God knows the future, how could God regret something once it has happened?”) The deity’s melancholy mood lasts only a little while, as we know, since immediately afterward he declares that he will “dissolve” mankind, animals, birds, and all creeping things.
The cause of God’s ire, the nature of the sin that elicits his disgust, is described at the beginning of Noach. The earth, as God becomes aware in Genesis 6:11, has been corrupted (vatishacheth); it was corrupted (nish’chathah)—the word recurs immediately in the following verse—because all flesh had corrupted its way (hish’chith). What exactly is the nature of this “corruption”? Rashi notes that the consonantal root of the Hebrew verb that recurs so strikingly often in these verses, sh-ch-th, denotes idolatry (it’s the verb used in Deuteronomy 4:16, when God warns his people against making graven images lest they become corrupt), and even more suggests gross sexual immorality. He glosses “all flesh had corrupted its way” as follows: “Even domestic animals, beasts, and birds had relations with those which were not of their species.”
The nature of the corruption, then, has to do with the wayward mixing of categories that are meant to remain distinct—a preoccupation of this particular religion, as becomes increasingly clear throughout the Torah, from that original act of cosmic Creation, described as a process of separation and distinction, to the rigorous insistence, in later books such as Leviticus, on the separation of kinds and species of things, for instance the segregation of dairy products from meat products, of the towels with the red stripes from the towels with the blue stripes. And indeed when instructing Noah on the construction, outfitting, and loading of the Ark, God reminds him that the pairs of animals with which he will eventually restock the earth (that second act of Creation) must be “each according to its kind”—a specification that Rashi explains thus: “Those who cleaved to their own species, and did not corrupt their way.”
The punishment for this particular brand of corruption, appropriately enough, reflects the nature of the crime. For the Flood that God unleashes has the effect of blurring the distinctions between things: as the waters rise, the ocean engulfs the dry land, and the mountains and distinguishing features of the landscape all disappear; when they do eventually reappear—as they had first appeared at the beginning of parashat Bereishit, when God first separated the water from the land—we are meant to feel it, surely, as a second Creation. This linkage between the crime and the punishment, another instance of the preoccupation in Noach with the way in which opposites are secretly connected, perhaps, is made evident in a striking verbal feature of the text: for the word that God uses when he says “I am about to destroy” all flesh is mash’chitham, which, like the words for “corrupt,” is derived from the same sh-ch-th root. In Noach, the punishment literally fits the crime.
Given the Torah’s obsessive preoccupation with segregation, separation, distinction, and purity, what is striking about the tale of God’s dissatisfaction with his Creation, and his decision to cause a Flood that will obliterate it, is his determination to destroy “all flesh.” The word “all” raises some difficult issues, implying as it does that at least some innocents will perish in the disaster. For presumably we can imagine that included in the designation “all flesh” there are, for instance, small children, or even babies—a category of person unlikely to have been engaging in interspecies miscegenation. Surprisingly, since he shows great humaneness elsewhere, Friedman shows no interest in the disturbing implication that God could be capable of killing innocents; he lingers instead on Noah’s “purity” and lack of “blemish” in a way intended to show how broad-minded the authors of this tale were. (“And it is important that a story composed by Jews emphasized the virtue of someone who is not a Jew…”; and indeed, this very passage has been adduced in certain debates to support the notion that there could be a category of people called Righteous Gentiles, i.e., non-Jews who tried to save Jews during the Second World War—people, presumably, like Ciszko Szymanski, about whom, in time, I would come to learn a great deal.) Rashi, on the other hand, wrestles, albeit briefly, with the dark implications of Noach. His sole comment on the phrase “the end of all flesh” is that “wherever you find promiscuity, catastrophe comes to the world and kills [both] good and bad.” This seems to imply either that the very sin denoted by sh-ch-th taints all who are even remotely connected to it, even the passive victims of (say) miscegenation; or that it is the guilty, through their indiscriminate sinning, who bring the punishment on the innocent as well—an interpretation that has the virtue of deflecting blame from God.
None of this, it must be said, seems very satisfying when you abandon the abstractions of the commentators and pause to wonder what, say, the extinction of the life of a small child might look or sound like, by drowning or indeed otherwise. Even after pondering Rashi’s commentary, it is hard not to feel, given the way that the Torah frets about maintaining distinctions between things, that the indiscriminate annihilation of the innocent along with the guilty in the Flood story is uncharacteristically sloppy and disturbingly—well, un-kosher. But then, perhaps in certain instances—when executing plans on a gigantic scale, for instance, plans for the reconfiguration of the whole world—the ability to keep all the details in mind, to make certain kinds of distinctions, becomes counterproductive.
DID ANYBODY KNOW for certain when Shmiel and Ester perished? I asked an hour and a half or so into our conversation on the day of the group meeting. By then I had already adopted Jack’s word, perish.
Meg said she thought it was in the second Aktion.
Jack said, Yes, that’s what I think, in the second Aktion. I didn’t see them after that. He then added, But I’m not sure.
I asked if anyone had seen them between the first and second Aktions.
After the first Aktion, Bob said, of course, you know, life was changed. We had to wear the armbands.
I nodded. Among Meg’s snapshots was a remarkable one that had all too obviously been taken during this period: Pepci Diamant walking down a street with another girl—Meg had identified her as one of the Flüchtling, the refugees from surrounding the area who’d poured into the town as the Germans stomped across Poland—both of them wearing the white armband with the blue Star of David. In this snapshot, both young women are smiling. I wondered who had taken it; and wondered, too, what Pepci Diamant had been thinking when she pasted it into her photo album, which, as we know, would survive her.
Jack said, After the first Aktion, you didn’t go—you didn’t come in the street. There was an allotted time you could only appear, an hour or two each day.
The Judenrat, Bob went on, had to provide people for work and so forth, and
that’s how it went on. And of course—
(I wondered why he said of course like this, and assumed that maybe he meant, simply, the bad luck of the Jews)
—at the same time a flood started.
A flood? I asked. For a moment I thought he was being metaphorical. A flood of woes, a flood of troubles, something like that.
But no: it was a real flood. It was raining a lot, Bob said, and took everything off the fields, so suddenly food became very expensive. There was hunger. By the time we got to the spring of 1942 a lot of Jewish people were dying—and not one or two a week but daily. Just of starvation.
I thought of Shmiel and Ester, the surviving three daughters, living in anguish and terror in the white-painted house. In his letters to my grandfather, to his cousin Joe Mittelmark, to Aunt Jeanette and her husband, he had constantly complained about money, the expenses of sending the girls to school, the fact that he didn’t have enough money to get his truck out of the shop. Now, by—say—Passover of 1942, there was no work at all, of course, and people were starving. How do people live, I had wondered, when there was no longer any economy? They didn’t; they starved.
Meg said, softly, Everyone talked about the hunger, after the first Aktion. I used to dream about bread. Not cake: bread.
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million Page 27