The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  Mr. Grossbard leaned toward me again, wagging his finger.

  Yes, he said, the French.

  He paused for emphasis, and then he said:

  You know, my father never did get over the Dreyfus Affair.

  In parashat Noach, after God instructs Noah in how to build an ark, he gives detailed orders about what Noah must bring into the ark; for we must remember that no breathing thing will survive the awful annihilation. “Everything that is in the earth shall expire,” God says. Noah will go, of course; and with him his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives. (The specific order—first men, then women, rather than, as one might expect, the elder couple followed by the younger couples—is an indication that separation between the sexes was maintained on Noah’s ark. “From this,” Rashi observed, “we learn that they were forbidden to have relations.”) And then, famously, the animals and birds: not two of each, as is commonly thought, but at least two of each, so as to ensure the possibility of future propagation of every species; of “pure” species—i.e., those suitable for sacrifice—seven pairs were brought, presumably so that the proper ritual sacrifices might still be observed after debarkation without imperiling those species’ future.

  The description of the Flood itself lives up to the slowly building anticipation we feel as we read about the preparations for it: the founts of the earth and the windows of heaven opened, the rains poured down for forty days—the length of time, Rashi helpfully points out, that it takes for the fetus to form after conception (divine payback, he goes on to remark, for God’s having been troubled to fashion the fetuses of the corrupt)—and for one hundred and fifty days the waters remained on the earth, rising until they covered the mountains themselves. It would be difficult to imagine a detail more effective than this last one (well, at least in biblical times, when the scale of things was smaller than it is today) in suggesting the extent of the obliteration that God accomplished with the Flood—not merely the destruction of life, but the erasure of the landscape itself, the swift and sudden elimination of every familiar landmark, of every familiar thing.

  It is this that puts me in mind of something that we are not told in parashat Noach. Perhaps because I’ve spent the past few years listening to stories of people who had to leave certain places in a great hurry, and because, moreover, Rashi at least is alert to the fact that Noah, whatever his close relationship with God, waited until the last minute to get on the ark, a detail that led Rashi to conclude that Noah, like the others of the Generation of the Flood, “was one of those of little faith, he did not believe the flood would really come until the waters were upon him”—I often wonder whether Noah and his family brought anything else with them, besides the animals, some memento, perhaps, of the lives they had before the world was completely wiped clean. Since the text makes no mention of this, I must assume that they did not, and as a result I can’t help thinking that this awful deprivation gave flavor to the joy with which Noah greeted the appearance of the olive sprig in the beak of the famous dove. We know, of course, what the immediate significance of the branch was, but I can’t help thinking that seeing the green leaf—a sudden, vivid, specific reminder of the world he’d left behind—must have felt, to him, like a reprieve from another kind of oblivion altogether.

  IT WAS LATER that afternoon that we met with Bob Grunschlag. This was also the day that Matt had selected for a photo shoot on the beach.

  Why on the beach? I had asked, a little irritated, when he announced that he wanted to drive down to Bondi Beach with Jack and Bob and have them get their feet wet a little for his portrait of the two brothers from Bolechow who had survived. Didn’t he know these were quite elderly people? I didn’t want to push them too hard. I needed their goodwill.

  Look, he said, you do what you do, and let me do what I know how to do. My job is playing bad cop to people until they reach the breaking point. I need a picture that says “Australia,” otherwise why did I come?

  Fine, I said.

  So late in the afternoon of the following day, after we’d had our long lunch with Meg and Mr. Grossbard, we drove to Bob’s apartment, which is right on the beach, and talked to him for a while, much to the satisfaction of Jack, who had wanted to make sure that his little brother, who hadn’t really known the Jäger girls, was getting some attention, too.

  Good boy, good boy, Jack had said, patting me on the shoulder affectionately when I told him we were in fact going to devote an interview to Bob.

  Well, I said, I’m an older brother, too. I know how these things are.

  But I didn’t, really. It would be another trip or two before I got close to Matt, started feeling protective toward him.

  On the beach, Matt shepherded Bob and Jack into the surf and then, having decided there was no other way to get the shot he wanted, suddenly took off his own wet shoes and, turning to me, thrust them into my hands. He waded knee-deep in the early evening surf and started opening the cases that hung from his neck. He kept glancing worriedly up at the sky. Our conversation with Bob had gone on a little bit longer than he’d liked; the sun was starting to sink.

  I only shoot with available light, he said.

  I only talk to available people, I cracked.

  Jack and Bob laughed. They were in a good humor; they didn’t have to be pushed. A little bit further, Matt said, waving at the brothers without looking up from the viewfinder of his boxy old Hasselblad. The brothers happily rolled up their trousers a little further, too. I heard the distinctive and by now familiar noise of the shutter on Matt’s camera opening and closing: not so much a click as a k-shonck. Since there was nothing for me to do here, I began to amble off. Let him do his thing, I thought.

  But just as I was about to go for a little stroll, I noticed that a small crowd of surfers had begun to gather behind where Matt had taken his stand, shooting picture after picture. K-shonck, k-shonck. It was seven in the evening by now and the light was failing fast, and I could tell from the frown Matt wore that he still didn’t feel he had the picture; what was in front of him, evidently, didn’t quite match the image he had in his head. Well, I thought, I know what that’s like. Suddenly I saw him wading through the foamy water and approaching a dark-haired, white-toothed surfer. The sound of the surf was too loud for me to hear anything they were saying; it was like watching a pantomime. Matt waved his arm at the surfer, who couldn’t have been more than twenty, and then pointed to Jack and Bob, and then made a little inverted V with his forefinger and middle finger and used them to make little walking motions back and forth. Dolina hoise, I thought. The surfer cracked a huge smile, then, and nodded. Lifting his board, he started walking back and forth behind Bob and Jack as the two brothers put their arms around each other’s shoulders. Matt began squeezing the shutter, over and over. He was smiling now. He was doing his thing.

  And, as it turned out, I got to do mine, too. As the grinning surfer boy tried to look nonchalant as he walked back and forth behind the real subjects of the picture, some of his friends started circling around me: two other boys, one blond, quite tall and serious-faced, the other dark and grinning, and a big, wide-grinned blond girl. Who were these two old men? they wanted to know. Were they famous? Were they our parents? Was this guy a fashion photographer? What were they doing here?

  I looked across at the two old men from Bolechow, and then looked up at these Australian kids. They were so enormous, so tall. They exuded health and goodwill. None of them could be older than nineteen. They looked genuinely interested. The girl was cocking her head to one side, expectantly.

  Well, I said. It’s a long story.

  The girl grinned and gestured to the boy whom Matt had conscripted for his picture. Hey, he’s our mate, she said. We have to wait for him anyway.

  OK, I said.

  How on earth to begin?

  Well, I began, My grandfather came from this little town in Poland…

  The next evening, Meg flew back to Melbourne.

  That afternoon, she had invited everyone t
o lunch at a fancy restaurant downtown: Jack, Sarah, Bob, Boris, Matt, me. She was in a buoyant mood, suddenly. Something had shifted, during our long conversation together the previous day; she had decided we were all right. (She made you lunch? Jack had exclaimed the previous night, when I’d called to report on our interview with Meg.) I only wish I could tell you what she said. I only wish you could see her face, how expressive it is, the wit, the mournful humor that plays across it sometimes, how a world-weary irony can give way suddenly and devastatingly to a sadness I can’t begin to understand, the way it did when, at the end of that afternoon, Matt asked her to hold a photograph of her old friend Frydka as he shot her portrait, and just as the shutter clicked some memory washed over her and, as the final picture, which you will never see, clearly shows, she closed her eyes in grief, so that the picture that resulted shows the seamed face of an elegant if diminutive woman who is holding, in her immaculately manicured hand, a snapshot of a dreamy-looking, self-serious young girl whose eyes are wide open, although of course it is the old woman’s eyes who are open, now, while those of the girl closed forever sixty years ago.

  During our final lunch, her face was animated, and her humor good. As we all met in front of the restaurant, she walked toward me.

  What, no kiss on the cheek? she said, presenting it flirtatiously. I grinned and pecked her on the cheek. She turned to Sarah Greene, who was laughing, and grew expansive.

  I can’t think about it, it’s amazing, she said. First of all that I am alive, after so long, and then that I meet cousins of my girlfriends. I still can’t believe it, that I’m standing here with the cousins of Frydka. It hasn’t sunk in, really. I can’t believe it.

  I knew what she was talking about: the strangeness of suddenly being able to pick up threads long since abandoned, threads you’d never have guessed existed anymore. (Doktor Begleiter? He was a very big doctor!) You are now my family, she had told my mother the day before, when after the interview was over I called my parents’ house on Long Island so that this woman and her lost friend’s cousin could make contact. You are my relatives, now.

  We turned to go into the restaurant, and, growing bold, I said I only wished there were others like her.

  What? she said, staring at me with mock ferocity. You don’t know? Sure there are others who knew them.

  I looked at Matt and took my pen and notepad out of my bag.

  Who? I said.

  She smiled with satisfaction and started talking. One friend of Frydka, her name was Dyzia Lew, she’s going now by Mrs. Rybek. She married a Russian. After the war I said, I’m going to the West. And she said, what for, there’s 350 million beggars in the Soviet Union, two more won’t matter. But I went to the West, and she stayed behind. And then she went to Israel, and she met Shlomo. His sister was my girlfriend, she added.

  The others? I said, writing as I spoke: DYZIA LEV? LOEW?

  And there is one in Stockholm, Meg said. Her name is Klara Schoenfeld, no, sorry, Schoenfeld was her maiden name. Her husband was the one who escaped, the only one who escaped on the way to the execution in the cemetery. His name was Jakob Freilich. Klara Freilich is her name, she’s in Stockholm. She wasn’t so close to us, we were on friendly terms but she didn’t go to high school. But sure, she knew Frydka.

  I grinned and turned to my brother.

  What do you say, Matt, I said, loudly enough for her to hear, since I wanted her to approve of us, to believe how serious we were. We’ll go to Stockholm?

  Meg’s eyes widened.

  What, really? she said. I can give you the address.

  She took the pen and pad out of my hand and, after searching through her bag, started writing. She tore off a sheet and handed me a piece of paper on which she’d written, in an old-fashioned hand, KLARA FREILICH, and then the address, the visual oddness of whose spelling and letters, which I contemplated in the strong sunlight of a New South Wales early autumn afternoon, already spoke of very distant places, further travels. EDESTAVÖGEN, she had written, a name that meant absolutely nothing to me. SVEDEN, she had written, a kind of misspelling I had stopped even noticing long ago because I was so used to the orthography of Jews from Bolechow. This is the public school I attendet. Sitting down is my dear brother SHMIEL in the Austrian Army, this picture was taking in 1916. Well, I thought, maybe we will go to “Sveden.”

  What else do you want to know? Meg said, her voice growing noticeably lighter as I put the square of paper on which she had written EDESTAVÖGEN in my pocket. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.

  She smoothed a strand of copper hair that had flown upward in the warm summery breeze, and smiled faintly. No, I won’t tell you everything. Some things cannot be told.

  That’s OK, I said, although I was already thinking that at least one of these others, whose names I had never heard before, was bound to tell me about Frydka and Ciszko Szymanski.

  And? I asked.

  Reinharz! Jack said to Meg. He should talk to them.

  Who is Reinharz? I asked.

  It’s two people, a couple who survived, I’m sure they knew Shmiel and the others.

  Just as my grandfather would have done, Jack pronounced it surwived.

  And? I said.

  Also you should go to Tel Aviv, Meg said, there is Klara Heller. She was Lorka’s friend.

  Lorka’s friend? For some reason, I had never imagined her as having any—never imagined, in any case, that there would be any left. LORKA FRIEND!! → CLARA HELLER → ISRAEL, I wrote in my pad.

  It’s enough for you? Meg said, reaching out her arm to herd everyone into the restaurant at last.

  It’s enough, I said. We went into the restaurant.

  Three months later, we flew to Israel.

  PART FOUR

  Lech Lecha,

  or,

  Go Forth!

  (June 2003–February 2004)

  BUT THE DISADVANTAGE WITH SOURCES, HOWEVER TRUTHFUL THEY TRY TO BE, IS THEIR LACK OF PRECISION IN MATTERS OF DETAIL AND THEIR IMPASSIONED ACCOUNT OF EVENTS…THE PROLIFERATION OF SECONDARY AND TERTIARY SOURCES, SOME COPIED, OTHERS CARELESSLY TRANSMITTED, SOME REPEATED FROM HEARSAY, OTHERS WHO CHANGED DETAILS IN GOOD OR BAD FAITH, SOME FREELY INTERPRETED, OTHERS RECTIFIED, SOME PROPAGATED WITH TOTAL INDIFFERENCE, OTHERS PROCLAIMED AS THE ONE, ETERNAL AND IRREPLACEABLE TRUTH, THE LAST OF THESE THE MOST SUSPECT OF ALL.

  José Saramago,

  The History of the Siege of Lisbon

  Parashat Noach, that terrible tale of extermination, is in many ways a story about water. By contrast, the next weekly reading in the Torah, parashat Lech Lecha, is very much preoccupied with dry land. Like Noach, it is, in a way, also a narrative about traveling, with the difference that the landscape (or seascape) through which the characters in the earlier parashah must travel is mysterious and unknowable, whereas the heroes of Lech Lecha—Noah’s distant descendant Abram, a Chaldean from the city of Ur, and his family, the first worshippers of the Hebrew God—move through spaces that are described in careful detail: their appearance, dimensions, their unfamiliar inhabitants. Indeed, it’s possible to see Lech Lecha as the first travelogue, a story that takes its hero from his “homeland, birthplace, and father’s house” to the land of wonders in which he and his people will henceforth live.

  This preoccupation with land and territory is not accidental: for as is well-known, Lech Lecha is the parashah in which God explicitly names his covenant with Abram: “Go out from your land, your birthplace, your father’s house,” God says to Abram, “to the place that I will show you. I will make you into a big nation, and I’ll bless you and make your name great. And be a blessing! And all the families of the earth will be blessed through you.” (Friedman, whose translation this is, is not the first commentator to point out that it’s never made clear just what the nature of this blessing, this benefit to the whole human race, will be.) For this reason, Lech Lecha is, among other things, the most obviously political of all the early parashot: again and again, it introduces into the ongoing
narrative of the human race advertisements, announcements, and warnings intended to legitimize the claims of the people of Abram to a specific patch of land. The name of that square mileage was Canaan. From the moment Abram arrives in this land, we feel that trouble lies ahead, for as the text is unembarrassed to acknowledge, “the Canaanite was in the land then,” too. Still, God makes his promise, and keeps reiterating it throughout Lech Lecha: “I will give this land to your seed.” The coordinates of the property to be shifted thus from the Canaanites to the people of Abram—the details of the transfer are not worked out in the text of God’s promise—are carefully spelled out: as far as the place of Shechem, as far as the oak of Moreh, Beth El to the east and Ai to the west, the Negev, and so forth.

  The text’s increasing specificity about land mirrors a grander narrowing process, nicely analyzed by Friedman in his commentary: the first eleven chapters of Genesis, he writes—that is, Bereishit and Noach—are about the relationship between God and the entire human community. That relationship clearly soured, with the result that after ten generations God destroyed humanity except for Noah’s family. (This is the first “narrowing.”) After another ten generations, God focuses on one of Noah’s descendants, Abram. (The second “narrowing.”) The rest of the Bible will, essentially, be a story told in exhaustive detail about that one virtuous man’s family as it struggles to maintain a hold on the property God has promised them.

  I myself have no interest in the territorial aspect and political implications of Lech Lecha, although it goes without saying that the promises cited in this parashah have been often cited for political purposes, even (as incredible as it may seem to secular people, for whom the Torah is nothing more than a work of literature) today. To be sure, certain more general themes of this parashah are intriguing for someone like me, a person deeply interested in the rich and complex culture of certain now-vanished civilizations, such as the culture of pre–World War I Austria-Hungary, or the multilayered urban life of interwar Polish cities like Lwów. Not the least of these themes is the way in which different groups of people can either coexist in a certain place or (more often) try to expel each other from it. Another might be this: what it means to feel at home in a country in which you are, by rights, a stranger, and yet to which you’ve been told you have a profound and inalienable claim.