The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  Still, it must be said that her mind is far vaster than mine, synthesizes material more creatively and daringly, sees possibilities where I (who grew up after all in a house run according to the Mittelmarks’ German mania for order, as my mother liked to say) see only messes, only problems. Your problem, Froma said to me once when I was halfway through my dissertation on Greek tragedy and had come to what I’d thought was a hopeless impasse, until she showed me that it was a passageway, Your problem, she said—she was holding one of the long brown cigarettes with one hand, staring at me, as she does when her mind is occupied with a problem, with her head cocked slightly to one side, oblivious to the fact that two inches of ash were about to drop into her lap; the other hand, heavy with rings, was toying with one of the large, artisanal pieces of metal-and-enamel jewelry she favors—your problem, she repeated, is that you see the complexity as the problem, and not the solution.

  It was only after I went to study with her that I learned that she, too, had a profound interest in the fate of the Jews during World War II. Typically, her interest was higher, more far-ranging, at once more abstract and more searching than mine. The granddaughter of two rabbis, themselves the products of the high intellectual culture of Vilna (“the Jerusalem of the North,” as it was called, although I have been there and can tell you that very little remains) and the daughter of serious Reconstructionist Jews, she, unlike me, had had a rigorous Jewish education: read and spoke Hebrew fluently, knew Jewish and Hebrew religion and law and literature intimately, as I had never cared to, until now. As a profoundly Jewish person and, in a way, as a person who had devoted her professional life to the nature of tragedy, how could she not, in the end, become obsessed by the Holocaust?

  Whereas for me, as we know, it was a family affair, something much smaller. I wanted to know what happened to Uncle Shmiel and the others; she wanted to know what happened to everybody. And not only that. Even today, long after she first started pointing me in the direction of multivolume works on Nazi medical experiments and documentary films on the partisans of Vilna and dozens, hundreds of other documents and films and books, things I simply don’t have the time to absorb, and which leave me wondering, even now, at the enormous energy of mind that allows her to read and see and digest it all; years after those beginnings, she still hungers after information that will help her formulate answers to still larger questions: how it happened and, a question for which there can never be an answer any one person can grasp, why it happened.

  Anyway, this is why, years after I had ceased to be her student, formally speaking, years after she had helped me through my thesis on Greek tragedy, I was still learning from her, still being pushed to see the problem as the solution.

  AND SO FROMA, too, became part of the search for the lost, and now, in the summer of 2003, we were traveling together. We had met in Prague, where she was finishing up a tour of Holocaust-related sites. What did we see in Prague? We saw Josefov, the ancient Jewish quarter, with its tiny, almost subterranean synagogues with their cool walls perspiring against the summer heat, the crooked street filled with blond tourists dutifully consulting guidebooks and impulsively buying postcards (THE PINCHUS SYNAGOGUE IN JEWISH PRAGUE); we saw the opulent Islamic-inspired interior decoration of the yellow-and-white-painted Spanish Synagogue, built in 1868 on the site of what had been the oldest shul in Prague, and now restored for the admiring eyes of tourists in all of its riotous, polychrome dazzle; we saw, in the Old Jewish Cemetery, the lavishly sculpted and ornamented tomb of Rabbi Judah ben Loew Bezalel, who died at eighty-four in 1609 and who is the man who is said to have created the Golem from the mud of the Vltava River as a defense against the bitter anti-Semites in the court of the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II. By a curious coincidence, the Golem was called Yossel—“Joey,” in Yiddish—the same nickname that, three centuries later, the grateful Jews of towns like Bolechow gave to Rudolf’s descendant, Franz Josef I, in affectionate gratitude for his benevolence to the Jews. As you leave this cemetery, you can buy little statuettes of the earlier Yossel, an early if primitive response to the persecution of the Jews of the city.

  What else did we see? We saw objects that were far more artful than the Yossel statuettes: the thousands of fabulous carved and sculpted and engraved and embossed cups and vessels and ritual objects of every description that can be found in the permanent exhibition of European Judaica that is located on the upper floor of the Spanish Synagogue, the part that had once been the women’s gallery, when there were still Jews in Prague to pray in the synagogues through which I and hundreds of other tourists reverently walked, that fine summer day. By a curious coincidence, this collection of Torah crowns and ceremonial tapers and goblets and medallions owes its richness (although this information is not prominently noted in the exhibition itself) to the fact that Hitler had designated Prague as the location of the Museum of an Extinct People he planned to have built, so that Aryans might, presumably, gawk at them in years to come. And indeed the riches of at least one-hundred and fifty-three communities from the region around Prague were duly transported to the city in 1942 for evaluation and sorting, although the Nazis’ museum of the Jewish people was never built, which is why these ornate and opulent pieces may now be admired by tourists today as they pass through this quarter of Prague before returning to their hotels to start thinking about where to get some dinner.

  So we saw all that, before we returned to our own hotel looking for dinner; for after all, as interested—as obsessed, even—as we may be in the past, we live in the present, and the business of living must be attended to. Still, the past has odd ways of catching up with you. It was in Prague that the first of what I thought, then, as a bizarre series of coincidences took place. On the evening before Froma and I were to go to Terezin—the “model” concentration camp, located not far from the city, which had once been shown to visiting Red Cross officials as an example of German humanity to its interned Jews, subversives, and other prisoners—she and I were taking the elevator to the top floor of our hotel, where there was a bar that, our hotel guide informed us, boasted a fabulous view of the city. A few floors before we reached this marvelous aerie, the elevator stopped and a well-dressed, not particularly old man got in. He had, I noticed, a few large gold rings and a very expensive watch. As often happens in this situation, there was an awkward, smiling silence as the doors closed and the elevator began to rise again. Suddenly this white-haired, vigorous-looking man turned to us rather casually and—nodding as if in agreement, as if what he was about to say were the continuation of a conversation the three of us had been having all along—said, Yes, I was in Babi Yar.

  The next morning we got on an immense, air-conditioned motor coach for the hour-long drive to the last camp that Froma’s group was visiting on its grim tour. The Czechs call the place Terezín, but its name, when it was founded under a much earlier regime, and also under the Nazi occupation, was Theresienstadt, “City of Theresia”: which is to say, the city of Maria Theresia, the great Habsburg empress of the eighteenth century, the Victoria of Mitteleuropa. It was thus named because the fortress town of Theresienstadt, completed in 1780, the year the queen died, was part of a network of walled and armored fortress towns constructed during and just after the reign of this plump, domineering woman for the protection of the vast Habsburg dominion, a multicultural patchwork of countries and provinces and principalities that finally disintegrated after a Serb nationalist called Gavrilo Princip (who was clearly not happy to be part of this patchwork) assassinated Maria Theresia’s descendant, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of the by-now ancient Franz Josef, Yossele, on a June day in 1914, thereby triggering the first of the declarations and ultimatums that led, as rapidly, predictably, and inevitably as a snaking row of dominoes will collapse, to the outbreak of the First World War. And I must say that, when I visited the camp and the various museums now located on the site on that drizzly day in June 2003, as Froma and I walked through the reconstructed barracks and the ghetto
museum, lingered over the poignant display of artwork done by children in the camp during the Nazi years, the thing that moved me most, that had the most profound resonance for me, was the realization that in one of the old cells of this onetime fortress prison—a tiny, thick-walled chamber that I entered briefly before I was overcome, as I often am (for instance in elevators and small underground spaces) by claustrophobia—Gavrilo Princip himself had been incarcerated after he killed the archduke. He died there not long afterward. I stood there, strangely moved by this unexpected and very concrete reminder of the crime that triggered the first tremendous slaughter of the century, and as I did so I felt embarrassed that it was this, more than anything, that had affected me in more than a generic or abstract way. It was only after I’d stood there for a while and thought about it that I realized that the reason I was so moved was that this trace of Gavrilo Princip and his crime, unsought by me or anyone else who was visiting that day, all of whom were avid for Holocaust-related information, had allowed me to leapfrog back in time to my grandfather’s Austro-Hungarian childhood and adolescence, the vanished moment when the worst political disaster that had ever befallen Bolechow’s Jews was, in fact, the assassination of their beloved emperor’s heir and the onset of the war, that, they were sure, would be the worst they’d ever see.

  So we saw Theresienstadt, too. From the Theresienstadt Web site you can send your friends electronic postcards bearing the greeting ARBEIT MACHT FREI; the postcard that I mailed to Mrs. Begley from Prague was simply a cheery photograph of Josefov, the quaint old quarter that is now a tourist destination. Prague is beautiful, I wrote, today we went to the Jewish quarter. No Jews in sight. Given her slightly sour sense of humor, I suspected she’d enjoy the grim joke, and I was right. Very funny, she told me with mock disapproval when I visited her soon after returning from my monthlong trip to Prague, Vienna, Tel Aviv, Vilnius, and Riga. We were sitting in her apartment as I retailed my various adventures. She brandished the postcards I’d sent. You see? I got all your cards. She motioned for Ella to pour me some more iced tea; it was warm in her living room because, although it was the end of July, she’d turned off the air conditioner. I can’t hear when that thing is on, she said, glaring at the appliance from the high-backed reproduction bergère she liked to sit in, at the corner of the living room, a chair that looked, I always thought, vaguely like a throne, although that might have less to do with the chair itself than with her posture, which was, until only very recently, ramrod straight: she would perch at the edge of the seat, sometimes holding a cane to lean on, and look at me levelly with her hooded, appraising eye, and listen to my stories, only occasionally shaking her head a little and sighing that I was too sentimental, or gesturing angrily at some flowers I’d brought, which Ella had placed on the coffee table and which Mrs. Begley waved away with a gnarled hand as a waste of money I could have been spending on my children. How are the children? was always the first question she’d shoot at me, after she’d taken her thronelike seat next to a bookcase crowded with photographs of her child and his children. The child, the child, everyone told me I must save the child, she had wept one day, fairly early on in our relationship, the day on which she told me how guilty she felt for not having been able to save anyone else. On this particular day three years later, the day I visited to regale her with stories of my Central European odyssey, I drank my iced tea while she smiled humorlessly and said, No Jews, I can imagine. We’re all here or in the grave.

  FROM A FILTHY and depressing Soviet-era train station in Prague, where the decrepit and aggressive old man who wouldn’t stop bothering us turned out to be a porter offering his services, we took the four-hour train trip to Vienna, a city that I love, not least because it figures, however slightly, in certain family stories. (My father, my grandfather used to tell me, would go once a year even to Vienna, for his business, and oh the treats he would bring back for us, the toys, the sweets!) Vienna was a city that Froma had not seen before, and I was eager to show her its grandiose beauties, the epically scaled baroque and Beaux-Arts buildings whose always slightly outsized details, the inflated cornices and overwrought moldings, were once a symbol of an excessive imperial self-confidence, and now can seem almost embarrassing, given that the empire for which these ornaments were designed has vanished—the way in which, say, an older female relative who has gotten absurdly overdressed for a casual occasion might embarrass you. And yet I love Vienna, perhaps because the tenacity with which it clings to discarded formalities of another era reminds me of certain former Austrians I myself have known.

  What did we see in Vienna? We saw many of the things I love, not the least of which, since my enthusiasm for tombs is not at all limited to Jewish tombs, is the Kaisergruft, the imperial Habsburg crypt, a cool underground space that reminded me, the first time I visited some years ago, of a wine cellar, although instead of casks and bottles waiting under the low vaulted ceilings there were sarcophagi in bronze and stone, writhing with statues and crowned skulls, whispering Latin inscriptions to anyone who cared to look. Naturally the largest of the monuments is that of Maria Theresia herself who, in life-size bronze, raises herself up on one arm from the lid of her own enormous coffin, her face wreathed in an ecstatic smile, although whether the ecstasy is due to the anticipation of eternal life, or to the fact that her much-loved husband, Stephen of Lorraine, is similarly elevating himself opposite her, I can never quite determine. We saw the Kaisergruft, where Franz Josef himself lies in a sleek marble sarcophagus in the center of a soberly restrained chamber ringed with subtle sconces, the emperor between his beautiful doomed wife, Elisabeth, herself the victim of an assassin, and his romantic son, Rudolf, the crown prince who killed himself in a suicide pact with his teenaged mistress at a royal hunting lodge called Mayerling in January 1889, a fact that, among other things, makes me wonder about certain family stories, for instance the one my grandfather’s unhappy sister Sylvia used to tell about how, as a small child, she saw this same crown prince ride up the steps of a palace in Lemberg (as she would have called it) on a white horse, wearing a blue uniform, since Sylvia herself wasn’t born until 1898, which is to say nine years after Rudolf committed the act that would make him so romantically famous.

  So we saw all that. But as I’ve said, Froma has a hungry mind. My feeling is, she told me later, when I asked why, as we traveled together, she was always saying Let’s go back and take one last look, why she always pushed to see more sights, to ask more questions, to wring out of her travels far more than I ever would, My feeling is, you may never pass this way again, so you have to squeeze everything out of it. Froma was not, at any rate, content with dead Habsburgs; she was particularly interested to see sites of Jewish interest. And here again I am forced to admit that because of my own history, the influence of my family and its stories, my emotions were engaged by one site in particular that might not be of great interest to most others. For it wasn’t until our last day in Vienna, after we’d visited the Jewish museum in the Dorotheergasse (where you can learn, as I did, that soon after the first Jews arrived in the city, in the late 1100s, the first pogrom took place, in which sixteen Jews were killed, an act to which the pope gave his blessing); after we’d gone to see the new museum in the ancient Judenplatz, Jew Square (under which, we were told, archaeologists have discovered the remains of the city’s early synagogue, destroyed in 1420, the year in which, on the twenty-third of May, the duke ordered that the Jews of Vienna be either imprisoned or expelled and their property confiscated; these remains, however, cannot be that extensive since the stones from the demolished synagogue were used for the construction of city’s University); after we’d examined the Memorial to Austrian Holocaust Victims designed by the British artist Rachel Whiteread, which takes the form of a concrete cube representing a library of seven thousand volumes whose doors are permanently locked and whose books cannot be read, the base of which gives the names of places where nearly seventy thousand Viennese Jews were eliminated—after we saw all this, we
went on our last day to the Zentralfriedhof, the great Central Cemetery of the city. We went there because Froma had been particularly interested to locate the original gravesite of that nineteenth-century Zionist pioneer, Theodor Herzl, “the father of modern Israel,” who died in Vienna in 1904, at the age of forty-four (and whose remains had, in fact, been transferred in 1949 to the newly founded state of Israel: a gesture that makes sense when you keep in mind the fact that graves, gravesites, memorials, and monuments are of no use to the dead but mean a great deal to the living). We consulted one of the innumerable maps and guidebooks that Froma likes to acquire when she travels—I, less inquisitive and more passive, prefer to amble around and run into things—and made our plans.