Meg paused for a moment as she thought.
In winter, she said, the nights were very long. They used to play cards at our place, my father with his friends. And the ladies used to crochet and knit. Mostly embroider. That was the pastime. The parents used to play also bridge and chess.
The Jäger house was always very clean, she said, a little bit later on.
And then, toward the end of our conversation, she repeated what she’d said a few days earlier about the long-dead mother of her close friend, Frydka Jäger. Her mother was very pleasant, she said. She had a cheerful personality, her mother did, she said—although I should add that when, during this second and final conversation with Meg, she brought up Ester’s personality (which, I can now say with certainty, will always lack the telling detail, the vivid anecdote: who among us won’t remember the mothers of our high school friends as being friendly, and cheerful?)—it was to make a point about Frydka, her friend.
Frydka was like her mother, Meg said that day. Lorka was a little bit more—she was different.
How was she different? I pressed.
Meg paused.
She looked different, she was different.
But how different? I felt desperate to have one small fragment of Lorka’s personality, something concrete, something that would rescue her from the generic.
How shall I describe it? Meg said, spreading her hands in exasperation. Then she said, Her personality was different. She was different from Frydka. They looked different. They didn’t even look like sisters. Ruchele looked more like Frydka. But Lorka looked…different.
I ended up changing the subject. What, really, can you say about a person?
So it was very hard to know what Ester had been like. Perhaps she had played cards with friends on a winter’s night, or crocheted or knit; certainly she kept a tidy house. And she clearly had a pleasant disposition. She was very warm, very friendly, cheerful. But this impression I have of her personality derives at least in part from the fact that an elderly woman who had once been a teenager in Bolechow was making a point about somebody else.
And about Bronia? Precious little of the youngest of Shmiel’s daughters, the youngest of my mother’s cousins, remains in the world now, either. The problem, in a way, was that she was too young: only ten when the war broke out, not quite thirteen when the second Aktion ended her life, she was too young to be a candidate for forced labor, which had the effect of prolonging some people’s lives, in some cases long enough to die in subsequent actions, in other cases long enough to make the decision to flee to the Babij camp, which was also eventually destroyed, and in still other cases long enough to make the decision to go into hiding, as Jack and Bob and the others had done, which is how they survived. For all of this, Bronia was simply too young, and it is simply as an ordinary young girl that the few people who could remember anything about her in 2003 recalled her, and hence it is as an ordinary girl I must now describe her, too.
I remember Bronia, Jack told me, at the end of his much longer narrative about Ruchele. She was a little kid, I would see her in the street and I would say, “Hallo, Bronia!”
The way he says hallo instead of hello moved me; there was something so cheerful and everyday about it, something a little bit dated. The word itself—although it is, of course, just an English translation of whatever Jack had once said to Bronia in Polish, decades ago—was like an emissary from a lost moment in history. I smiled.
Jack smiled, too. She was four years younger, she was Bob’s age. She was ten when the war broke out. Ruchele was born in ’twenty-five, I think it was September ’twenty-five, and Bronia, as far as I remember, was born in ’twenty-nine. She would be playing in the backyard, I’d stay by the fence and say “Hallo, Bronia.” She was a sweet girl, still very childlike. You could see her mind was still on playing, on games.
Perhaps it was this childish sweetness that had made Meg, on the day all the Bolechowers had met, smile at the mere mention of Bronia’s name, when I had handed around the picture of her, a pretty girl standing between her parents, that day. And Bronia! she had said, her face brightening for a moment. And yet when I talked to her in private, a few days later, she was frustrated that she couldn’t really remember anything about Bronia—not even having stopped to say hello to her in the streets.
The youngest one I can’t recall, Meg said slowly, as she sat in her brother-in-law’s living room. Bronia. I was digging in my memory, trying, but I can’t…Lorka I saw, because I saw her growing up together, and Ruchele was around the house. But Bronia I just can’t—there are no recollections, I can’t tell you why. She was just a baby.
She paused for a second. When you went to the house she’d be there, when you showed me the photo I knew it was her. But I just can’t…Her voice trailed off.
So that was Bronia. In that one clear picture I have of her, from 1939, when she was most likely ten years old, she is wearing a dark-colored pinafore, low white socks, and Mary Janes. She is smiling. Her parents, who unlike her would have been reading the newspapers, aren’t.
AND THAT, AS far as I knew, once I had spoken to all the Australians, was who they had been.
Maybe what had happened to them was something like this:
On whichever day it was—the third, the fourth, the fifth of September 1942—there came, mostly likely, the crashing at the door. (I cannot imagine that the Germans, with their Ukrainian guides, knocked: perhaps they smashed the butts of their rifles on the door of the white-painted house.) For whatever reason—most likely because they are already at work at the Fassfabrik—Lorka and Frydka aren’t in the house; and so it is Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia who are moved along (beaten? grabbed? knocked about with the rifle butts that had knocked against the door? Impossible to know) from the house and into the street, where so many others, weeping, screaming, terrified, are gathered and being forced in the direction of the Magistrat, the ratusz, the city hall besides which the Jäger family store has stood for generations.
In the courtyard behind the city hall they are made to wait, with the twenty-five hundred others, and as I contemplate this scene, I have to entertain the possibility that one or even more of the three, it could have been all three, even, don’t survive this waiting period. For instance, maybe Bronia was one of the ninety-six Jews whom the boastful Ukrainian single-handedly killed during that time, most of whom, as we know, were children. Maybe this girl was thrown from an upper story onto the pavement below; maybe she was spun round and round by a Ukrainian policeman by the legs until her head was crushed, splattering the matter of her brain, the matter that, so mysteriously, had once constituted the personality that no one, sixty-one years later, can recollect in any detail, against the corner of the city hall itself. Or maybe Ester, a large woman by then, had moved too slowly when they banged against the door of the white-painted house, or maybe she was sick in bed that day and, either out of impatience or just for fun, either the German or the Ukrainian who had come to collect them shot the fat, sick woman there, on the spot, in her bed.
Or maybe one of the Ukrainians who were helping with the Aktion that day recognized Shmiel Jäger in the crowd, and maybe this Ukrainian was (as, for instance, the father of old Olga, whom we’d met in Bolechow, had once been) a butcher, too, a member of that little cartel of local butchers, and maybe this Ukrainian butcher had long resented Shmiel, the big-shot Jew who had lorded it over people in the way that he had, and maybe, because of that, this Ukrainian, when he recognized Shmiel, came over to him and beat him for a while with his pistol or the butt of his rifle, or simply shot him in the head.
(Or, worse, not in the head. You begged to fall into the hands of the Germans, Meg told me on the day she finally allowed me to speak to her in private, believe me. The Germans had what they called the mercy bullet, the Gnadekugel—she had finally remembered the word—but the Ukrainians would shoot you in the stomach, and it would be maybe forty-eight hours before you died. A horrible, slow death.)
But maybe not.
Maybe, somehow, my mother’s aunt and uncle and childlike cousin survived the gathering process. In which case, we know, they would have been marched, after the days of terror in the courtyard of the city hall, the hours of screams and beatings and the crushing of children’s skulls, of watching Mrs. Grynberg standing dazed with the bloody bits hanging from between her legs, marched across town to the train station, past the house with the false wall behind which the young Jack and Bob were, at that very moment, hiding—and perhaps here Shmiel, as dazed as he was, looked up and recognized the house of Moses Grünschlag, a man of his generation whom he certainly knew, another preoccupied businessman who rarely went to shul and who had siblings in America who, like Shmiel’s brother, might at that moment have been bringing their annual summer holiday in Far Rockaway, New York, to a melancholy end—hiding and listening to the weeping and cries and groaning (indeed, to the singing) of which some small part, one sound, might have come from the throats of Shmiel and Ester and Bronia; and then forced, at some point, to get up into the cattle car.
Since by the time I talked to those four in Sydney that day I had already been to Bolechow, I was able, if not to imagine what any of this could actually have felt like for them, at least to envision the backdrop for this suffering, to see in my mind’s eye the buildings they passed during their final walk through the streets of the town. From the courtyard of the Magistrat they would have walked straight down Dolinska, the street that leads south in the direction, ultimately, of Dolina; after a couple of hundred yards they would have made the left turn onto the Bahnstrasse, the rather long, dusty road, perhaps a half mile long, that leads to the railway station. I have made this trip myself, by now. It made me tired.
And afterward? Of their long final journey, the day or days on the train, in the suffocatingly cramped freight car, it is possible to know certain details from Matylda Gelernter’s witness statement, which I obtained after I flew to Israel and drove to Jerusalem one day: details that themselves had been conveyed to Mrs. Gelernter by the woman she refers to only as “Stern,” the woman who first was compelled to suffocate her two-year-old in the hiding place in which she had been concealed, and then, after being torn from that hiding place and forced to board the cattle car, left another child behind—perhaps one of the children who had slaked its thirst with its own urine—when she somehow managed to jump from the train, which is how we know, today, some of what went on in the same train that took Shmiel and Ester and Bronia to Belzec.
In trying to reconstruct what the final days or day of my three relatives might have been like, I have to entertain the probability that “Stern” described to Matylda Gelernter what it had been like inside the freight cars in far greater detail than Gelernter conveyed in her statement, and that Gelernter abbreviated her own description because she hadn’t actually been there and, after all, the focus of her testimony was to relate things of which she had personal knowledge. With this in mind, I have consulted other sources about the conditions inside the freight cars to the Operation Reinhard camps, during the late summer of 1942. I will not paraphrase these sources, will not “describe” what it was like, but instead will let the survivor’s account, cited by Arad, speak for itself:
Over 100 people were packed into our car…. It is impossible to describe the tragic situation in our airless, closed freight car. It was one big toilet. Everyone tried to push his way to a small air aperture. Everyone was lying on the floor. I also lay down. I found a crack in the floorboards into which I pushed my nose in order to get a little air. The stink in the car was unbearable. People were defecating in all four corners of the car…. The situation inside the car was becoming worse. Water. We begged the railroad workers. We would pay them well. Some paid 500 and 1000 złotys for a small cup of water…. I paid 500 złotys (more than half the money I had) for a cup of water—about half a liter. As I began to drink, a woman, whose child had fainted, attacked me. I drank; I couldn’t take the cup from my lips. The woman bit deep into my hand—with all her strength she wanted to force me to leave her a little water. I paid no attention to the pain. I would have undergone any pain on earth for a little more water. But I did leave a few drops at the bottom of the cup, and I watched the child drink. The situation in the car was deteriorating. It was only seven in the morning, but the sun was already heating the car. The men removed their shirts and lay half naked. Some of the women, too, took off their dresses and lay in their undergarments. People lay on the floor, gasping and shuddering as if feverish, their heads lolling, laboring to get some air into their lungs. Some were in complete despair and no longer moved.
This account, together with the account of “Stern” as relayed by Matylda Gelernter, suggests why whatever we see in museums, the artifacts and the evidence, can give us only the dimmest comprehension of what the event itself was like; why we must be careful when we try to envision “what it was like.” It is possible today, for instance, to walk around inside a vintage cattle car in a museum, but it is perhaps important to recall, in the age of “reality” entertainments, that simply being in that enclosed, boxlike space—an unpleasant enough experience, as I well know, for some people—is not the same as being in that space after you’ve had to smother your toddler to death and to drink your own urine in desperation, experiences that the visitors to such exhibits are unlikely to have recently undergone.
It may be, in any event, that Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia did not survive the journey in the freight car. If they did, however, what would have then happened to them would have been something like this (as we know from the statements of the few who survived, and from the testimony of those perpetrators who were later brought to justice):
Upon arrival, the trains stopped at the spur inside the Belzec camp. Within minutes of arriving (“three to five minutes,” one Polish locomotive driver later recalled), the cars were emptied of their freight of dead and living Jews. Gasping, dazed, smeared with their own and others’ filth, Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia would have stumbled out of the car into the “reception area.” Here, they may well have heard a German officer, perhaps even the commandant of the camp, Wirth, give his usual speech: that they had been brought here for “transfer” only and that, for reasons of hygiene, they had to be bathed and disinfected before being moved to their next destination. Whether Shmiel or Ester believed this, it is of course impossible to know; but knowing how ready he had been, just three years earlier, to believe that a letter to President “Rosiwelt” might help him and his family to get to America, I will entertain the possibility that, like most people, he was reluctant to believe that the worst would happen, and so he may well have been one of those Jews who, as we know from the testimony of one of the officers who served under Wirth, actually applauded Wirth after he gave his speech to the dazed and shit-encrusted Jews on the railway siding at Belzec, the speech in which he assured them that their valuables, which they had been told to deposit on a counter, would be returned to them after the disinfection treatment. It is possible, although by no means certain, that Shmiel’s eyes alighted for a moment, that day, on the sign that read:
Attention!
Complete removal of clothing!
All personal belongings, except money, jewelry, documents and certificates, must be left on the ground. Money, jewelry and documents must be kept until being deposited at the window. Shoes must be collected and tied in pairs and put in the place indicated.
Maybe he saw this sign, and maybe its tone—not, when you think of it, all that different from the tone of similar signs in the swimming pools and shower rooms of bath spas throughout Europe, spas like the one in Jaremcze where Shmiel’s father, thirty years earlier, had dropped dead—had reassured him.
In any event, if things were proceeding normally, that day in early September 1942, which we now know was the period of the most intense “resettlement” activity at Belzec, Shmiel was at this point separated from his wife and daughter, and was brought to the undressing barracks. (The men were gassed first.) There is no questio
n that he took off his filthy clothes; perhaps they included the dark coat and tattersall shirt he is wearing in the final photograph that we have of him, a tiny square on the back of which he has written Dezember 1939, which is therefore the only surviving relic of his life during the Soviet occupation. In it, he looks very old…. He was, as we know, very tall, and perhaps he had been beaten on the way to the Bolechow railway station; it is more than likely that, as he stopped to take off his shoes and socks, he was in considerable physical pain; and of course, then there was the shock, and now the horror of separation from Ester and Bronia. (Had he even been able to say good-bye to them? Maybe they were somehow separated in the cattle car, maybe they had been placed in different cars, back in Bolechow.) On the other hand, being the sort of person he was, maybe the fact that he was now in an organized and orderly institutional setting was something he hoped was a good sign. Maybe, he thought to himself, the terror of the gathering in the courtyard of the city hall, of the march across the town to the waiting train, and then the train itself, had been the worst of it.
From the undressing barracks, the naked Shmiel Jäger, whom we must pause to remember was, at this point, a tall man with blue eyes and a full head of white hair, was now herded through the relatively narrow passageway known as the Schlauch, the “Tube,” a passageway about two meters wide and a few dozen meters long. Partly fenced with boards and surrounded by barbed wire, the Tube connected the reception areas at Belzec, in Camp 1, with the gas chambers and burial pits, in Camp 2. It is difficult to believe that my grandfather’s brother, a fastidious man, did not try, by cupping and lowering his hands (which, if they were like my grandfather’s hands, and mine, were squarish and dusted with dark hair), to cover his private parts as he half-walked, half-trotted along the Schlauch.
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million Page 30