The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  The tram ride from central Vienna to the Zentralfriedhof takes a good twenty minutes, and the cemetery is so gigantic that there is a different tram stop for each of its various gates; the distance between gates (by which of course I mean not simply the space but also the time it takes to get from one to another) is not at all inconsiderable. We began at Gate 1, which is the gate to the “Old” Jewish Section of the cemetery, and strode into a thicket of graves that was, that summer, still somewhat overgrown, although a recent outcry about the sorry state of the once-great necropolis had resulted in a much-touted restoration effort. But after wandering for nearly an hour among the elaborate and neglected gravestones and monuments, memorials to people whom there is nobody anymore to remember, since for the most part the descendants of these nineteenth-century grandees had themselves vanished off the face of the earth, it became clear that we were in the wrong place. And so, after walking twenty minutes to the central section, we walked another twenty minutes to get to Gate 4, where the New Jewish Section is located. I myself had little interest in Herzl or his grave since, as I have said, Israel was at that point still a place about which I felt indifferent. But I did find myself overwhelmed by what we found in the New Jewish Section.

  Or, I should say, what we didn’t find. Eyes wide, we passed through the extremely attractive, rather Art Deco gateway of this new part of the Zentralfriedhof, a gateway whose repeated motif of stylized, vaguely Moorish arches was repeated, on a gigantic scale, in the dome of the New Jewish Section’s Zeremonienhalle, the Ceremonial Hall of the cemetery’s burial society. (This society is known, in Hebrew, as the Chevra Kadisha, and traditionally it is the members of the Chevra Kadisha in a given Jewish community who wash and prepare Jewish bodies for burial: the rite that had been specified by my grandfather in the instructions he dictated to me, that summer morning.) The Vienna cemetery’s Zeremonienhalle complex, I later learned, had been designed and built between 1926 and 1928 by the prolific Hungarian-born Viennese Jewish architect Ignaz Reiser, every one of whose public buildings, from the 1912–1914 synagogue on a street called Enzersdorferstrasse to the Zeremonienhalle itself, is listed, in the German-language architectural reference I consulted after seeing this remarkable cemetery complex, as zerstört: “destroyed.” As we moved past the Zeremonienhalle, which I did not then realize was a restoration, a reconstruction of an edifice that had been savaged on the evening of November 8, 1938, and walked to the burial ground itself, the sight that greeted us was one largely of emptiness. For of the vast plot of land that had been bought by the Jews of Vienna in the 1920s for the new section of the cemetery, once the old section had become overcrowded with the dead of this flourishing community, only a relatively small portion was filled with graves. Next to those graves (almost none of which, Froma and I noticed as we walked around, dates to later than the early 1930s) an enormous expanse of empty land stretched out. We stared at this for a while until we realized that the New Jewish Section was largely empty because all of the Jews who, in the normal course of things, would have been buried there had, in fact, died in ways they hadn’t foreseen, and if they’d been buried at all, had been buried in other, less attractive graves not of their choosing. When we think of the terrible damage that results from certain kinds of wartime destruction, we normally think of the emptiness of places that had once been filled with life: houses and shops and cafés and parks and museums, and so forth. I’d spent a great deal of time in graveyards, but even so it had never occurred to me, until that afternoon in the Zentralfriedhof, that cemeteries, too, can be bereft.

  This, at any rate, is what Froma’s search for the grave of the great Zionist Theodor Herzl had led us to. We never did find the grave itself, although I suspect that only Froma was unhappy about that, since for me what we’d seen, or rather not seen, in the New Jewish Section had been enough.

  From Vienna I sent Mrs. Begley a postcard of opulent Habsburg palaces. Vienna is still beautiful, I wrote, but no Jews—not even dead ones. She had liked that one, too.

  It was on the day after our visit to the Zentralfriedhof that we left for the land that Herzl fathered.

  IN THE APARTMENT of Anna Heller Stern, who was Lorka’s friend, it was cool and shadowy. The window shades were lowered against a summer sun so strong that it felt almost fluorescent. The furnishings were comfortable but few: a low sofa, a couple of contemporary chairs grouped around a low table. What with the sparseness of the room’s contents and the coolness of the bare floors and the almost subaqueous shade, the overall impression I had, on walking through the door of Anna’s apartment, was of the pleasant relief I’ve sometimes felt when, to escape from the heat of a summer afternoon on a day spent copying down inscriptions in neglected cemeteries, I have taken refuge in some once-grand and now-forgotten family’s mausoleum.

  Like her apartment, Anna herself seemed at once friendly and slightly reserved. She smiled warmly and shook my hand firmly when Shlomo introduced us, but there was also a sense about her of something very slightly wary, as if somewhere in her apartment, or perhaps in her, there was something she might not, after all, want you to know about. When she answered the door, a slightly pear-shaped woman with a tentative, pretty face and the delicate complexion and faintly ginger hair of someone who avoids the sun, she was wearing a sleeveless white blouse and a narrow gray skirt that reached the tops of her knees. As with my grandmothers, the heavy flesh on her upper arms was both plump and sleek, like a dough that has been kneaded for a long time. With one of these arms, Anna Stern gestured for Shlomo and me to come into the apartment, and we sat down. Anna sat opposite Shlomo, and I sat down on the sofa, where I spread out my tape recorder, tapes, videocamera, file folders, and the one extant photograph of Lorka that we possess, that group shot of the family during their mourning for Shmiel’s mother in 1934, which I planned to show her during the interview.

  Shlomo was speaking to Anna in Yiddish, and my ears pricked up when I heard him say Di ferlorene. The Lost.

  He is writing a book about his family, Shlomo explained to her as we took our seats. On the low table Anna had laid out plates, cups, napkins. There was a tray of carefully sliced cakes and pastries that could easily have fed fifteen people. Smiling, Anna gently pushed the tray toward me, beckoning for me to eat. Shlomo went on, It is called The Lost. Di ferlorene.

  Di ferlorene, Anna repeated, nodding, as if this title required no explanation.

  Di ferlorene. I wasn’t sure exactly how it was decided that this interview would be conducted in Yiddish. I had expected to be hearing the soft, susurrous sounds of Polish, the language that both Anna and Shlomo had grown up speaking in Bolechow in the interwar period, the language into which Meg Grossbard had often lapsed, during the group interview in Sydney, pretending that it was a slip on her part, although I suspected then, and suspect even more today, now that I know her better, that she did so in order to remind me, subtly, that this was her life, her story, a story from which I, a second-generation American, as she liked to point out, was inevitably excluded, except perhaps as a latecomer, a mere observer. Alternatively, I had thought that they might be speaking Hebrew, the language of the country in which these two former Poles now lived, until Shlomo explained to me that Anna had moved to Israel fairly recently from South America, where she’d gone after the war with her husband.

  She left Poland in 1947, Shlomo said to me in English. She was twenty-six. And she lived forty-two years in Argentina. She is only in Israel for the past few years.

  At the sound of the word Argentina, Anna smiled and picked up a Spanish newspaper that was lying on a side table and nodded at me. Ikh red keyn Ebreyish, she said to me in Yiddish. I speak no Hebrew.

  This was fine with me; neither did I, I who had learned by rote my haftarah, and for that reason had no idea that I was singing about the purgation of the Jewish community; I who for a long time had no interest in deciphering Hebrew texts, texts that I found out almost too late could illuminate family secrets and family lies. But I was o
nly too happy to hear, as I had never expected to hear again after my grandfather died, Yiddish falling from the lips of a Bolechower. Yiddish was the language of Europe, of the Old Country; its moist, rich sounds curl around my memories, familiar yet mysterious, the way that Hebrew letters undulate on a piece of paper or stone. My mother spoke it with her parents; her parents spoke it with each other; her uncles and aunts spoke it among themselves and with their husbands and wives, and—so my mother told me, when I was trying to remember the other day just how much Yiddish was spoken in my family once, but of course not anymore, since almost everyone who knew it has died—her older cousin Marilyn, Jeanette’s daughter, spoke it as a child with her grandmother, her father’s mother, the dreaded Tante. Yiddish was the language my mother spoke with her father when she didn’t want us to know the nature of whatever drama or crisis or gossip they were discussing. (Ober mayn frayndine hut gezugt azoy, she would say with a frown as she talked on the phone with him, gesturing with a pursed face that he could not, of course, see, toward the house of a neighbor she had quarreled with and soon would not be speaking to: but my girlfriend said that…) Yiddish was the language of the punch lines of my grandfather’s jokes.

  This is why, when Shlomo asked if it would be all right to conduct this interview in Yiddish, of course I said yes. I was longing to hear Yiddish again.

  Yaw, I said in her direction, and she smiled. She put the Spanish paper back down, turned to Shlomo, and spoke in a Yiddish too rapid for me to understand. He waited for her to finish, nodded at her, and turning to me he said, In Argentina she started living again. In Argentina she understood that she was a human being again.

  I nodded, and then I said, Let’s begin.

  For the sake of the record, I said, I wanted to ask her to tell me the name she was born with, her parents’ names, the names of her family in Bolechow. I liked to begin this way, because it was easy.

  Ikh? she repeated. Me? Ikh hiess Chaya, jetz hayss ich Anna. I was called Chaya, now I’m called Anna. Where, I wondered, was the “Klara Heller” Meg Grossbard had told me to find in Israel? Without translating for Anna, Shlomo explained to me that when she was a girl in Bolechow she’d been called Klara, but to honor the Ukrainian priest who’d saved her life by giving her false baptismal papers, she’d kept the name he made up for her even after the war was over: Anna.

  And her family? I asked, gently coaching her through this easy part.

  She looked at me and splayed the fingers on one hand, reserving the thumb. Vir zaynen geveyn fier kinder, she said. We were four children. She tapped her forefinger: number one. A shvester, Ester Heller—

  On the second syllable of Ester her voice suddenly became ragged with tears and she put both hands to her face. Turning to Shlomo, she said in Yiddish—this I could understand—

  You see? Already I can’t go on.

  LATER ON DURING this conversation in the shady, cool apartment, I would learn how the sister was taken in the second Aktion—an event that Anna, hiding in a hayloft, witnessed, watching the two thousand Jews of Bolechow make their way to the train station, singing “Mayn Shtetele Belz,” a memory so painful to Anna as she recalled it that morning in her apartment that she covered her face with her hands once more at the recollection—learned how Ester Heller had died, how the two brothers and the parents died, another family of six that was destroyed; but that came later. At the beginning of our discussion, when the cakes were still largely untouched, Anna politely tried to connect whatever information she was giving me to my family.

  Ikh verd den Detzember dray und achzig yuhr, she told me. In December I’ll be eighty-three years old. She added, Lorka was a few months older than I.

  Oh? I said, although I knew this must be true, because Lorka’s birth certificate says 21 May 1920. I wanted to know how she remembered that so vividly.

  Anna smiled. Vayss farvuss ikh vayss? You know why I know? Because in first grade I was the smallest and the youngest! With Lorka I went to school until the seventh grade. From six years old till thirteen. Understand? Fershteyss?

  I nodded back. Ikh fershteyeh, I said.

  Anna started talking about the Jägers. Her memories came in no particular order. I didn’t interrupt, because I was as interested in her chain of thought as in the memories themselves.

  Shmiel Jäger had a truck, he used to take things to Lemberg, Anna said, using the old, old name for Lwów. And he would bring goods back from Lemberg…. They were a very nice family, a nice woman…

  I am always interested to know more about Ester. Did she have clear memories of Ester, Shmiel’s wife? I asked.

  Anna smiled. Sie veyhn a feine froh, a gitte mamma, a gitte balabustah. Vuss noch ken ikh vissen? She was a fine wife, a good mom, a good housewife. What else could I know?

  She said something to Shlomo, who turned to me.

  She was a child, he said, what happened in their house she doesn’t know. She said the mother was an excellent wife, the house was very clean, and the children were clean-dressed, the children were clothed very nicely.

  Anna turned to me. Di zeyst? she declared. Lorkas familyeh kenn ikh besser als Malka Grossbard!

  See? I know Lorka’s family better than Meg Grossbard does!

  She said something to Shlomo, who explained to me that her mother’s brother, a Mr. Zwiebel, was a neighbor of Shmiel Jäger. He was living next to him, Shlomo said. So Anna (he went on) used to come see her uncle, and for that reason she used to see Lorka all the time, not just in school.

  To prove this, perhaps, Anna shared an early memory. I remember, she said, that when the first strawberries came out each year they would be on sale first in Lemberg. So your uncle Shmiel Jäger used to bring them from Lemberg to Bolechow, because they weren’t available in Bolechow yet. So Lorka would call for me at home the day the strawberries came and say, Come, take some of the new strawberries!

  I caught, suddenly and powerfully, a whiff of something, a trace, as unmistakable but elusive, of a certain rhythm of living, now invisible and unimaginable.

  Shmiel and his trucks: everyone seemed to remember that. What kind of man was Shmiel, I wanted to know.

  Anna gave a little smile and tapped her ear. Er var a bissl toip! He was a little deaf!

  Deaf? I repeated, and she said,

  Yes! Toip! Toip!

  I was silent. Then I asked, Does she remember any of the other girls?

  Di kleynste, she started to say, the youngest—

  Bronia, I prodded. I was excited at the thought that finally someone might be able to tell us something about Bronia. Bronia, who had disappeared into the Bath and Inhalation Rooms sixty years before; Bronia, who had the bad luck to be so young when she was taken, and because nobody that young was a useful worker, almost nobody that young—her friends, her schoolmates—had survived, which is why so little of her is left today to know about.

  Bronia? I said again. But Anna shook her head and said, Ruchele var di kleynste.

  Ruchele? I asked, startled. Anna nodded emphatically, but I didn’t pursue it.

  Which is why, when she went on to tell me that di kleynste, the smallest one, was a very solid girl, very sensitive, very delicate, that she belonged to a group of children who were all of them very polite and very gentle—a description, I knew, that fit well with Jack’s description of Ruchele—I couldn’t be sure if I’d ever learn anything about Bronia.

  I HAVE SOME pictures to show you, I said to Anna.

  To trigger her memories, I’d brought my folder of old family photographs, the ones I’d brought to Sydney, too. But after Sydney—after Boris Goldsmith had squinted at that tiny 1939 picture of Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia and said, with a sigh, I can’t make it out—I’d learned my lesson, and had greatly enlarged all the pictures I had. Now, even the smallest snapshot in my collection had grown to the size of a standard piece of printer paper: Shmiel’s careworn face, in that final photograph from Dezember 1939, was almost life-size. As I handled the folder one of the enlargements inside
slid onto the table: the 1936 photo of Frydka, Meg Grossbard, and Pepci Diamant in their fur-lined school overcoats and berets.

  Duss iss Frydka mit Malka Grossbard und Pepci Diamant, I said. This is Frydka with Malka Grossbard and Pepci Diamant. Anna immediately pointed to Meg’s face and, like someone taking a winning trick in a card game, gathered up the picture and said, Malka! Then she said, Frydka var zeyer sheyn—zeyer sheyn!

  Frydka was very pretty—very pretty!

  As she said this, Anna made an admiring gesture, a universal expression of wonderment: hands to cheeks, eyes raised heavenward. We had come to talk about Lorka, whom no one else had known well, but it didn’t surprise me that we had gotten onto the subject of Frydka, a girl who was so beautiful, a girl for whom a boy had given his life, the kind of girl, I had already sensed, to whom stories and myths naturally clung.

  I want to tell you a fact, Anna said, looking at this picture of the fourteen-year-old Frydka, and she started talking. Shlomo listened and then turned to me. He said, She said that Frydka should live today, be alive today. She was a modern woman, but she was living in the wrong time!

  What did she mean? I asked.

  Because the way she was living in that time, in a small shtetl, she was criticized! She was, you know, free!

  Criticized? I said, while I thought to myself: What was it about her? Even then, they were talking about her. Even then, she was the center of the story.

  Anna nodded. She should have lived fifty years later, she said again. Lorka, she went on, was quiet, serious, and had only one sympatia—

  (later, I looked up sympatia in a Polish dictionary: flame, it said, and there was something about how old-fashioned flame sounded to my ears that moved me, when I recalled Anna talking about Lorka and her sympatia)

  —one sympatia at a time. She had somebody that she liked, a brother of Mrs. Halpern. So she dated him…Bumo Halpern.