Whereas, in fact, not a single element of this entry in the Yad Vashem database is accurate, since (as we know from her birth certificate) Lorka was born on May 21, 1920, and she was, according to several eyewitness accounts, alive at least as late as the winter of 1942. And I might add that virtually all of the information provided by the same important source, the central database at Yad Vashem, for “Shmuel Yeger” (or “Ieger”) and “Ester Jeger” (and the three daughters the database attributes to them: “Lorka Jejger,” “Frida Yeger,” and “Rachel Jejger”) is demonstrably wrong, from the spelling of their names to the names of their parents (“Shmuel Ieger was born in Bolechov, Poland in 1895 to Elkana and Yona,” an error which, I thought when I first read this, eradicates my great-grandmother Taube Mittelmark from history, and with her the sibling tensions that may well have resulted in Shmiel’s decision to leave New York in 1914 and return to Bolechow, a decision to which his presence in this error-filled archive is attributable) to the years in which they were born and died. But unless, like me, you had a vested interest in the few facts that can still be known about them, you’d never know that the information about these six people that you were so happy to be able to find in the Yad Vashem database was almost completely incorrect, and you’d never be the wiser.
So I am used to the discrepancies between the facts and the “record,” and don’t get very upset by them. But I can see how they might be unsettling to some people.
Anyway, as Bob now reminded me, on the big things everyone agreed. Bad things happened during the second Aktion.
BOB TOLD ME later that he and Jack and their father had survived the second Aktion because his father, the head of the Judenrat, had had warnings; and because after the first Aktion, they’d built a hiding place.
We were hidden, he told me when we spoke together in private, because we had a false wall in the stable. That was built by a Jewish carpenter after the first Aktion. You see we already knew there’d be another Aktion. We knew already because a few weeks before that there were Aktions in different towns in the whole area. And the day before the Bolechow Aktion, the second, Father came in and said, “Tomorrow it’s starting.” So we went in the hiding place during the night, or the early hours of the morning, before the whole thing started in the street. They went into houses, house by house, catching Jews in the streets, in the fields. Then they herded them to the railway station and packed them onto the cattle trucks and took them to Belzec. And Belzec was an extermination camp—just an extermination camp.
He knew I knew what that meant. At Belzec, you got off the train and went into the gas chambers.
The going into the houses, the catching Jews in the streets, in the fields: the Grünschlags had witnessed none of this, of course. I remembered Jack saying, If I would have witnessed it I would have been dead, too. And yet, because of a particular accident of geography, the concealed Grünschlags did have knowledge of certain things that transpired during the three days that the second Aktion lasted.
We heard them leading them to the train, Bob said, because we lived in the street leading to the train station. As you walk along Dolinska Street, you turned right to go to the train station. And they were leading them along that street, to the cattle cars. So we heard the turmoil, the cries and the yells, and so forth. That ended and we came out of hiding, and you can imagine what the mood was.
No, actually: I couldn’t. And can’t. I have tried many times to imagine, to envision the experience of Uncle Shmiel and Ester and Bronia as they were taken or pushed or dragged from the white-painted, single-story house on Dlugosa Street, the house that Shmiel had fixed up when he first moved in, and were then forced to walk the short distance to the courtyard of the town hall—forced to walk that short distance and then waited there for days until they were made once again to walk, this time to the train station. Residing in the minds of both Jack and Bob are concrete memories of the sounds, the wailing and moaning and screams made by the two thousand Bolechow Jews who survived the first few days of the Aktion and made it to the train station; but these memories, and those sounds, are impossible for me to imagine since I have never heard the sound that is made by two thousand people being marched to their deaths.
And yet while it is important to avoid the temptation to ventriloquize, to “imagine” and then “describe” something for which there is simply no parallel in our experience of life, it is possible at least to learn some of what transpired during those three days in September, the three days of that second Aktion, since eyewitness reports have come down to us. These descriptions will of course never allow us to “know what Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia experienced,” since there is simply no way of reconstructing their subjective experiences, but it does permit us to construct a mental picture—a blurry one, to be sure—of certain things that were done to them, or rather were likely done to them, since we know that these things were done to others like them during the same event. I can look through the available sources and compare them, collate them, and from that arrive at a likely version of what probably happened to Uncle Shmiel, his wife, and their daughter in the days leading up to their deaths; but of course I will never know.
Of the various witness statements given by some of the forty-eight Bolechowers who survived the Nazi occupation, I randomly selected one given on the fifth of July 1946, by a certain Matylda Gelernter, thirty-eight years of age—born, therefore, the same year in which Meg’s brother-in-law had been born, the same year in which my mother’s aunt Jeanette had been born in Bolechow, too. She made the deposition in Katowice about what had happened in the town during the second Aktion:
On the 3rd, 4th and 5th of September 1942, the second action in Bolechów took place without a list: Men, women and children were caught in their houses, attics, hiding places. About 660 children were taken. People were killed in the town square in Bolechów and in the streets. The action lasted from before evening on Wednesday until Saturday. On Friday it was said that the action was already over. People decided to come out of hiding but the action started up again on Saturday and on that one day more people were killed than in the preceding days. The Germans and Ukrainians preyed especially on the children. They took the children by their legs and bashed their heads on the edge of the sidewalks, whilst they laughed and tried to kill them with one blow. Others threw children from the height of the first floor, so a child fell on the brick pavement until it was just pulp. The Gestapo men bragged that they killed 600 children and the Ukrainian Matowiecki (from Rozdoły near Z ydaczowy) proudly guessed that he had killed 96 Jews himself, mostly children.
On Saturday the corpses were gathered, thrown onto wagons, children into bags and brought to a cemetery and this time thrown into one pit. Concerning the fact that this action was to take place, Backenroth, a member of the Bolechów Judenrat who came from Wełdzirz, telephoned from Drohobycz. He said that we should expect “guests” on Thursday. But the Ukrainians of Bolechów themselves, not waiting for the Gestapo, started to capture and kill Jews before evening. My father, my child (not quite two years old) and I ran to the house of a Ukrainian we knew who had said at one time that he would let us in. But he didn’t let us in. We returned home and hid ourselves in a niche in our house. The child was crying and wanted to drink, but didn’t cry out because it was accustomed to this from the previous actions. Even when they shot a certain Jewess in front of the door of our hiding place, the child was frightened but kept quiet.
In the attic of the house next door my mother, brother and sister-in-law were hiding with a few-month-old baby. When Gestapo men and Ukrainians appeared in the neighbour’s attic, they wanted to escape so they climbed down the stairs from the attic but it turned out that Gestapo men and Ukrainians were sitting in the room getting drunk on cherry brandy, which they had found in the basement. They were so occupied with the brandy that they didn’t notice the people coming down, who immediately stepped back up into the attic. But the child started to cry. My sister-in-law didn’t have any breast
milk or anything else that she could use to quiet the child. She covered it with a pillow and it turns out that the child suffocated.
A large number of the Jews worked in factories at that time. But they were taken from the factories, led to the town square and here they were sorted near the town hall. The most talented according to the advice of the foremen of the factories were released and the rest were kept in custody. Soon they were killed in the town square and the streets. The walls and pavements were literally splashed in blood. After the action, the house walls and pavements were cleaned with the taps of the town hall.
A terrible episode happened with Mrs Grynberg. The Ukrainians and Germans, who had broken into her house, found her giving birth. The weeping and entreaties of bystanders didn’t help and she was taken from her home in a nightshirt and dragged into the square in front of the town hall. There, when the birth pangs started, she was dragged onto a dumpster in the yard of the town hall with a crowd of Ukrainians present, who cracked jokes and jeered and watched the pain of childbirth and she gave birth to a child. The child was immediately torn from her arms along with its umbilical cord and thrown—It was trampled by the crowd and she was stood on her feet as blood poured out of her with bleeding bits hanging and she stood that way for a few hours by the wall of the town hall, afterwards she went with all the others to the train station where they loaded her into a carriage in a train to Bełzec.
In the night after the action, the Ukrainians went looking for places to rob. They went barefoot. Among other things they tried the outer lock of the niche where we were hiding and enclosed. Our hearts stopped beating, we died. My child already made no noise. In the action—September 1942—which lasted three days, 600–700 children were killed and 800–900 adults. The approximately 70-year-old Krasel Streifer was also shot in her bed then, because she couldn’t walk. My mother-in-law Jenta Gelernter, age 71, also died then. She was taken out of bed in a nightshirt; they didn’t allow her to put anything else on. They shot her near the town hall because she couldn’t walk quickly. The rest of the Jews who had been captured, approximately 2,000, were taken to Bełzec. During the trip, Stern escaped from the train. She told us that more people had escaped like that. She continued to explain that once at a station along the way, I don’t remember where, hot steam was let into the car and people were burned, started to faint and choke. People were terribly tormented by thirst, especially pitiful was the children’s situation, starving and dying of thirst. There were incidents of sating thirst with urine. Mrs Stern leapt out of the car leaving behind her four-year-old daughter. That same Mrs Stern had been caught in her shelter, which had been revealed by the crying and moaning of her two-year-old child. When they heard that Germans and Ukrainians were near the shelter, people started yelling at Mrs Stern that her child would give them away. Then she covered the child with a pillow and when the shelter was found anyway, the child turned out to be suffocated.
Ukrainian Siczowcy [extractTextmilitary units assisting the SS] specially brought from Drohobycz helped with the second action.
During the march to the train station in Bolechów for the transport to Bełzec, they had to sing, particularly the song “My Little Town of Belz.” Whoever didn’t take part in the singing was beaten bloody on the shoulders and head with rifle butts.
So that is one sketch of the kinds of things that happened during the second Aktion, a tiny part of Operation Reinhard—one aim of which, the records show, was to make the Generalgouvernement completely Judenrein, Jew-free, in time for the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, although another, perhaps larger aim was to spare SS men the psychological trauma of having to shoot children of my mother’s cousin Bronia’s age, or to shoot heavyset women, very warm, very friendly women, like Aunt Ester, although presumably it wouldn’t have been all that traumatic to shoot a forty-seven-year-old man such as Uncle Shmiel, a man who, after all, had once borne arms himself, fighting for his emperor. I have often wondered, since Jack Greene first called me and I began to be able to focus my mental picture of Ruchele Jäger’s death—and since I began reading more deeply in the literature about Operation Reinhard—whether whoever it was who actually killed her, who operated the machine gun perched at some distance from the plank on the open pit, felt any psychological trauma, although I know that the odds are heavily against it. But it’s important to try to think about this, about the moment of the shooting, because although we’ve become used to thinking of the killing in terms of “operations” and Aktionen and chambers, which are abstract-sounding terms, there was (and this is easier to envision in the case of the shooting, where the link between the hand that squeezes the trigger and the bullets, and the targets, and the resulting deaths, seems so clear, so direct) always a single person who actually did it, and this I think is as important, in its way, to try to envision—I almost said “remember”—as it is to attempt to salvage something of the personality or appearance of a single victim, of some sixteen-year-old girl whom you knew absolutely nothing about until you began to travel vast distances to talk to people who knew her.
So that, as I was saying, was one picture of what the second Aktion looked like, give or take.
But before I come to the deaths of Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia, it seems only fair to try to imagine them as they were when they were living.
SHMIEL, OF COURSE, we know a little by this point. Indeed after talking to Jack and the others I feel I can envision him quite clearly, for instance, on that day in the 1930s when one of the pictures I know so well was taken: walking through the center of town—you call it the Ringplatz, if you are, as he is, old enough to have been born a subject of Emperor Franz Josef; it’s the Rynek to his children, the four beautiful girls who were born after the big war and who are, therefore, Polish, and think of themselves as wholly Polish until it becomes clear that they were wrong—there he is, walking through the Ringplatz, the Rynek, on his way to the shop, the head of the butchers’ cartel, somehow always taller than you recall, well dressed in a three-piece suit such as the one he wears in the picture I have, dated 1930, in which he strides purposefully on a city sidewalk. So I can see him in my mind’s eye, wearing a suit like that; or, perhaps, a suit like the one he’s wearing in that picture he sent as a remembrance of his forty-fourth birthday in April 1939, the one in which he’s posing with his drivers, two brothers, next to one of his trucks, the well-off merchant with his cigar and his gold watch-fob. I can see him. There he is, tall (as his second daughter Frydka was tall, too), prosperous, a tiny bit self-important, perhaps, moving in no great hurry since he wants to stop and greet everyone with that slightly lordly manner so many in his family have, a leftover from more prosperous times, as if he were indeed the król, the king, which is what some people, half-affectionate and half-mocking, secretly call him, and of course he knows it, everyone in this small town knows everything about everyone, but he doesn’t mind. His vanity is, if anything, secretly flattered: after all, he is the one who chose to stay in this town, when he could easily have gone elsewhere, precisely because he wanted to be a macher, a big fish in a small pond. And so why not enjoy being called the król, whatever the tones of voice of those who were calling you that? here he is, then, walking, being a big shot, a man who liked to be noticed, who enjoys being a somebody in the town, a person who very likely thought, until the very end, that returning to Bolechow from New York was the best decision he’d ever made.
Later on things became difficult, and to this difficult period belongs the Shmiel of the letters, a vivid if perhaps slightly less appealing figure than the earlier, more grandiose figure, a middle-aged and prematurely white-haired businessman and the brother, cousin, mishpuchah to his many correspondents in New York, with whom he was reduced, as time went on, to pleading, hectoring, cajoling rather desperately and, it must be said, a little pathetically as he tried to find a way to preserve his family or, indeed, even a small part of it, the children, even one daughter, the dear Lorka. (Why her? Because she was t
he oldest? Because she was the favorite? Impossible to know, now.)
Still, at least it’s possible to hear Shmiel’s voice, through the letters. Of Ester very little remains, now—at least in part because years ago, in my grandfather’s, or somebody’s, apartment in Miami Beach, I didn’t want to talk to the scary Minnie Spieler, who only thirty years later I realized was Ester’s sister, since I’d never thought her interesting enough even to ask about. Having now talked to every person still alive who had the opportunity to see and know Aunt Ester, however obliquely, I can report that almost nothing is left of this woman, apart from a handful of snapshots and the fact that she was very warm and friendly. (A woman, I can’t help thinking as I contemplate the annihilation of her life—annihilation may seem at first excessive, but I merely use it here in its fullest etymological sense, to reduce to nothing—who would, in the normal course of things, have died of, say, colon cancer in a hospital in Lwów in, perhaps, 1973, at the age of seventy-seven, although that is impossible to imagine, because she died so young and so long ago that she seems to belong wholly to the past, seems to have no claim on the present. And yet there’s no reason, apart from the obvious one, that she shouldn’t have been someone I knew, someone like all those other mysterious old people who’d appear at family events when I was growing up; just as the four girls, who will always be young, ought to have been the middle-aged “Polish cousins” whom we’d have visited in, say, the mid-1970s, my siblings and I, some summer. When I mentioned this strange notion to my brother Andrew, he paused for a moment and said, Yeah, it makes you realize that the Holocaust wasn’t something that simply happened, but is an event that’s still happening.)
There is, then, very little that remains on the face of the wide world today—a face I’ve looked at often from above, during the trips I made to find something out about her—of what Aunt Ester had been during the forty-six years she lived, before she disappeared from sight during the first few days of September 1942. She was very warm, very friendly, Meg had said, on the day we’d all gathered in Jack and Sarah Greene’s apartment. A few days later, when, after a great deal of hectoring and cajoling on my part, Meg finally consented to meet with me and talk to me one-on-one, in her brother-in-law’s apartment, I asked her to try to give me a sense of how a very warm, very friendly Bolechower housewife might have spent her time, in the days before the war changed everything.
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million Page 29