By September 1942, when Shmiel and Ester and Bronia were, I then thought, almost certainly gassed—there was almost no chance that this middle-aged man, who already looked old for his years, or his fat wife or young childlike daughter would have been selected for one of the work details, the groups of Jewish prisoners who cleaned out the chambers or buried the bodies after the gassing—Belzec’s old wooden gas chambers had been demolished and replaced by a bigger and much more solid building of gray concrete. After traversing the Tube, Shmiel approached this building and then shuffled up the three steps that led into it, which were about a meter wide and in front of which stood a big pot of flowers and a sign that said BADE UND INHALATIONSRAÜME, Bath and Inhalation Rooms. Passing inside this solid new building, he would have seen before him a dark corridor, a meter and a half wide, on either side of which are the doors to the Bath and Inhalation Rooms.
It is possible that he still believed, even now, that these really were Bath and Inhalation Rooms. Into one of them he walked. The rooms had, as one German who helped operate this camp later recalled, a “friendly, bright appearance,” and were painted either yellow or gray, something institutional and unthreatening. The ceilings were fairly low—two meters, which for a man of Shmiel’s height must have been ever so slightly claustrophobia-inducing—but perhaps even now he didn’t register this, even now thought that he was going to be getting a disinfectant shower. There were, after all, showerheads protruding from the ceiling. If he saw the removable door at the back of the Inhalation Room, which was across the room from the door he just came through and was, in fact, the door through which, ten minutes later, his body would be dragged, he probably thought nothing of it.
After this, though, after Uncle Shmiel is squeezed into this low-ceilinged, yellow-painted, friendly, warm-looking shower chamber, after it fills with nineteen-hundred and ninety-nine other Jews, it will surely be harder for him to think that he’ll be getting a disinfection treatment, and at that point the gas comes on, and I will not try to imagine it, because he is in there alone, and neither I nor anyone else (except the nineteen-hundred and ninety-nine or so others who did go with him) can go there with him…Or, I should say, with them, since within a short time Ester and little Bronia will walk up the same steps, enter one of the rooms, make the same journey. (Unlike Shmiel, they had stopped first in the haircutting barrack where the Friseurs, the barbers, shaved off their dark hair.)
So we cannot go there with them. All I think I can say, now, with any degree of certainty, is that in one of those rooms, on a particular moment of a particular day in September 1942, although the moment and the day will never be known, the lives of my uncle Shmiel and his family, of Samuel Jäger, my grandfather’s brother, the heir to and rebuilder of the business that the cautious matrimonial interminglings of those generations of Jägers and Kornblühs had been designed to enhance, a man who wrote a certain number of letters between January and December 1939, a woman who was very warm, very friendly, a forty-seven-year-old father of four girls, a natty dresser and a bit of a big shot, too, in the small town where his family has lived, it seems, forever, a young girl who was still very much a baby, to whom a seventy-eight-year-old man living in Sydney, Australia, will recall that he once said Hallo, Bronia! over a fence, a man, a woman, a child who have been forced, by this point, to live with the knowledge that their third daughter, her older sister, a sixteen-year-old girl whom the father had named to perpetuate the memory of his darling sister who had died, it would one day be intoned, a week before her wedding, was shot to death at the edge of an open pit; an uncle, aunt, and cousin who at that moment, the moment at which he and then they hear, perhaps, the strange hiss begin, have a niece and a cousin whom they have never met but whom he has mentioned, politely, in a few of those letters (I say good bye to you and kiss you, and also dear Gerty and the dear child, from me and also from my darling wife and children to you and all the siblings too), a niece who lives in the Bronx, New York, a pretty blond eleven-year-old with braces who, in the first week of September 1942, has just entered the sixth grade (just as her future husband, then thirteen, so much of whose family would be lost to narrative, was just entering the eighth grade, where he played with a boy whom everyone called Billy Ehrenreich, which was not his real name but after all he lived upstairs with the Ehrenreichs, a refugee from Germany who would sometimes say to my father that he had had four sisters from whom he’d been separated and whom, he said, he’d “lost,” a word that my father, just a boy then, couldn’t quite understand)—in that room, they had eventually to breathe the poisoned air, and after a period of minutes the lives of Shmiel Jäger, Ester Schneelicht Jäger, and Bronia Jäger, lives that will, many years hence, amount to a collection of a few photographs and a few sentences about them, She called him the król, the king, she was very warm, very friendly, she was just a baby, playing with her toys, these lives, and many other things that were true about them but which now can also never be known, came to an end.
SO THAT WAS the second Aktion, which Bob and Jack Greene survived, because they had hidden themselves successfully, as Shmiel and his wife and daughter had not, if they had hidden themselves at all: a possibility that—so we thought, in Australia—it was impossible to confirm. Why had the Grünschlags been able to hide so successfully in the tiny space behind the false wall in the stable, and others not? Bob told us a story, and of all the stories we would hear on that trip, this is the one that affected my softhearted brother the most—perhaps because, unlike the other horrors we have heard about, which simply, and in my view rightly, defy any attempts, however well meaning, to identify with them, this story was about something small enough, homely enough, for even the innocent members of my and Matt’s generation to grasp.
By the time of the second Aktion, Bob said, I had to get rid of my dog. Believe me, that was the hardest thing I ever had to do. You have no idea. I had him from birth, I used to take him to bed with me to sleep with me, and of course the bed would be wet in the morning and they didn’t know if he did it or I did it!
He had to take this dog away and get rid of it, he went on, lest it bark and give them away, once they were in hiding behind the false wall. At the time we first heard it, Matt, who loves dogs, was very upset by this story; and since then this is the tale he will tell, when he talks about our trip to Australia that spring and wants you to understand the emotional horror of what people went through: this small boy had had to kill his dog.
I think it moved him so much precisely because it is so small. For some reason, the horror of a boy having to kill his beloved pet is easier to apprehend, to absorb and make real, than are other horrors. The horror, say, of having to kill your own child, lest its noise give you and the others away. But of course, when Bob Grunschlag first told us this story, we hadn’t yet read Mrs. Gelernter’s witness statement.
The vessel in which Noah and his family, along with numerous other examples of unblemished living things, were saved, has been an object of persistent fascination through history. What is intriguing about this famous vehicle of salvation is the strangeness of the Hebrew word used to denote the object we commonly render as “ark.” Friedman rightly, to my mind, complains of this by-now unavoidable translation, for what the feminine noun tebah properly connotes is, in fact, a “box.” This is certainly the implication we get from the text’s description of the ark: it is rectangular, there is no keel or rudder or sail, it is completely enclosed on all sides. It is moving to read Friedman’s feeling comments about this strangely blank object, in which the lack of any features we normally associate with a seagoing vessel makes for a poignant image: “in such a vessel,” he writes, “the humans and animals are utterly helpless, cast about in the waters without any control over their fate. To appreciate the image that this narrative sets before us, we must picture this helpless box of life tossed about in a violent universe that is breaking at its seams.” This picture of infantile helplessness is, in its way, appropriate, since the only other object in
the Torah that is referred to as a tebah is, in fact, the woven wicker container in which the infant Moses is secreted in order to escape yet another of the Torah’s examples of an attempt at total annihilation: the Egyptian pharaoh’s decree that the firstborn of Israel shall die. Like Noah’s ark, Moses’s basket is a humble, man-made object, totally enclosed, sealed with pitch, and no doubt utterly and frighteningly dark inside—a box whose passive occupant must, simply, take his chances.
The image of such a box as a place of refuge in a world that is breaking apart at the seams comes naturally enough to mind when considering stories like the one that Jack Greene and his brother Bob told me in Australia—stories in which salvation, in times of terror, was possible only for those who had constructed dark, boxlike hiding places: for instance, the tiny space behind the false wall that Moses Grünschlag had built in a stable for himself and his two remaining sons, the underground dugout in the forest to which, eventually, those three and a few others escaped and where they hid for a year, until the latter-day pharaoh was defeated. In these modern-day arks, too, the humans were utterly helpless, without any control over their fates, passive inhabitants of darkened spaces from which, eventually, they too would emerge, like Noah, like Moses, blinking into the light.
And yet, perhaps because of the subtle but insistent way that parashat Noach has of connecting things to their opposites, creation to destruction, destruction to rebirth, earthen figurines to muddy messes, sulfurous waters to sulfurous gopher wood, the boxes in which the forty-eight Jews of Bolechow were, ultimately, saved (to say nothing of how many other containers whose occupants were not so lucky, a figure impossible to know because there is no one to tell those stories) inevitably bring to mind certain other boxlike structures that were, in the latter-day narrative about the decree that the people of Israel must die, instruments not of salvation but of annihilation. Yes, there were the hiding places, the concealed, dark compartments in which the occupants could only listen and hope; but there were also the cattle cars, with their cargoes of storm-tossed humans; there were also the gas chambers.
Those were boxes, too. Those, too, were arks.
THAT, THEN, HAD been the second Aktion, in early September 1942, in which—or so everyone sitting at Jack and Sarah’s table thought—Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia had perished. Of this family of six, of whom there is only one extant photograph in which they all appear together, dated August 1934, in which Shmiel is shockingly unshaven and unkempt, an anomaly explained by the fact that he is (as the inscription on the back explains) in mourning for his mother, my great-grandmother Taube, who had died the month before: seven unsmiling faces that I now recognize as those of Shmiel, Ester, Ester’s brother Bruno, Bronia, Ruchele, Lorka, and dark-eyed Frydka, part of whose face is cut off by the edge of the picture—of this family of six, for whom there never was a period of formal mourning such as the one they were observing when that picture was taken, two were left by October 1942.
They ended up in the Fassfabrik, Jack had been saying, the barrel factory, Lorka and also Frydka, together with the Adlers. And we were associated with that firm as well, he said—meaning he and his surviving family: his father, Bob.
It was after the second Aktion, Jack explained, that people were assigned to the work camps. There were a few tanneries, he said, a sawmill, a barrel factory. And they dominated certain places where they were converted into camps, Lager, to live in, from which they’d go to work, and then each night they’d return there. Our father proceeded to convert our house into a Lager house. And in that house there were living some twenty-odd people.
Everyone was in a work camp? I said.
Anyone who wasn’t a worker, Jack replied, went to the ghetto in Stryj.
This, everyone said at the same time, was not a place you wanted to end up. But by 1943, it was clear that the “useful workers” were going to be killed as well. It was in ’43 that those who were thinking clearly began to make plans to escape.
So when did he think that Frydka and Lorka had fled and joined the partisans? I wanted to know.
’Forty-three, Jack said.
Mrs. Grossbard interjected. ’Forty-three? she said, musing. Not ’forty two?
’Forty-three, Jack repeated, emphatically.
Turning toward me, he went on: Frydka used to come to our Lager, our camp, almost every evening. She was in the Fassfabrik as an accountant. The chief accountant had gotten sick, he had kidney problems. So when that accountant, Samuels was his name, Shymek Samuels, when he got sick, he stayed in our Lager, which was considered a better Lager. So she used to come and visit him almost daily.
She and Lorka were in the Lager next to the Fassfabrik, where the Adlers lived, Jack added.
When he said this, I thought immediately of several things. First, that at least by 1943 Frydka and Lorka were living in the same place, which (I imagined) must have been a comfort. Second, Frydka, who in 1943 was twenty-one, must have been a sweet-natured young woman, to come visit this sick accountant, Samuels, even though merely to move around the streets of Bolechow at that time was, as Meg Grossbard made clear, to take your life in your hands. (We were outside the law, she said, trying to get me to understand what this meant. Anybody could kill us.) And third, finally, that this, in the end, was what her education at the commercial high school in Stryj had gotten her, this girl with the purposeful walk, this tall young woman who, Meg would let slip, used to take the train to a local spa called Morszyn with Meg and Pepci Diamant, when they were teenagers, and sneak into the dances that would be held there, dances they were technically too young to attend, this vivacious girl whose dark good looks had snared a blond Polish Catholic boy, dooming them both, although I wouldn’t know the details of that story for many months. This is what her costly education at the commercial high school had won Frydka: a few extra months as an accountant in the forced labor camp.
BY NOW, LONG into our conversation at Jack and Sarah Greene’s that day, a good while after the sounds of clinking plates and the gurgle of pouring coffee had ceased, only Frydka and Lorka were left. Their departure into the thick woods outside of Bolechow is the last time that anyone would ever see them.
So what was the thing that made people decide to escape into the forest? I asked.
After November ’forty-two we went into the Lager, Jack repeated. Everyone had a letter, either an R, which stood for Rüstung, munitions, or a W, which stood for Wirtschaft, economy.
At this point Meg and Bob began to argue about what W stood for: she thought it must be Wehrmacht, but he insisted it had to be Wirtschaft since, he argued, there was no substantive distinction between Rüstung and Wehrmacht.
As far as I was concerned, the question of what W had stood for was beside the point. The point is that in March 1943, all of the W workers, about three hundred people, were taken to the Jewish cemetery and shot in a mass grave. This was one of the “little” Aktions to which Jack had referred earlier; this was the Aktion that the old woman Olga whom we’d met in Ukraine had witnessed from her living-room window. At this point, Jack said, it became clear that even the “useful” laborers were not so crucial after all.
Yes, Meg said, slowly. Exactly sixty years ago. All my girlfriends were gone.
Bob said, All the W’s were exterminated.
Clearly, I thought to myself, it hadn’t mattered to the Germans what the W stood for either, in the end.
And the R’s, Bob went on, were left till August ’forty-three.
Jack suddenly said, I’m reminded that there was another Aktion. They had taken the Jews who didn’t go to the camps to Stryj. In March 1943, for some odd reason, they brought some ninety or a hundred people, Bolechower people, back from the Stryj ghetto to Bolechow. Among these was our uncle, Dovcie Ehrmann. And within twenty-four, forty-eight hours they took them into the cemetery and killed them.
Sorry, Jack, that I don’t remember at all, Bob said.
I can’t help it, Jack replied, it took place.
I know, I
know. I know the W’s were in the camp there, in Adler’s compound, they were taken in March of ’forty-three…
So then maybe it was April, Jack conceded. But they were taken, some ninety or one hundred people.
March, April: Whichever it was, by then Frydka and Lorka were, as far as these people remembered, no longer in Bolechow. Separately or together, possibly with the help of that certain Polish boy, the two sisters had managed to get away from Bolechow. They disappeared from sight, and nobody ever saw either of them again.
Or so we then thought.
This was the last that anyone in Sydney, that day, could tell me about any of the Jägers. It was also, as it happened, the last thing we talked about. Suddenly, the energy had gone out of the conversation. Everyone, and not only the elderly people there, was exhausted, spent.
ACTUALLY, THIS ISN’T quite true. The last person to speak that afternoon was Boris Goldsmith, who had remained quiet for most of this discussion, since he had not been there during the war, had not seen what the others had seen, or heard about. It was this that he suddenly wanted to make clear to me, just as the conversation was winding down.
I can’t tell you anything, he said, looking at me and spreading his big hands apart, because I hadn’t been there, I was in the army. In the Russian army.
I know, I said, in what I hoped was a reassuring tone of voice. But then, wanting to make him feel valuable, wanting to include him in the conversation as he had not been included in the events I had just been hearing about, I added, So what happened after the war was over. You went back?
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million Page 31