The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  Really? I said. This caught me by surprise. I explained to them that in Sydney, Meg Grossbard had insisted that Lorka’s boyfriend had been her distant cousin—my distant cousin—Yulek Zimmerman. Anna shook her head emphatically and said, Bumo Halpern.

  OK, I said. Anyway.

  Shlomo went on: Anna said that Lorka behaved, she behaved honestly and she didn’t—she had a sympathy to one man and she never betrayed him.

  Betrayed.

  And Frydka? I asked, knowing in advance what the answer would be.

  Anna beamed at me, and shaking her head as if the memory still amused her, and waving her fingers in the air, she said, Frydka var geveyn a—

  (she paused and, not finding the correct word in Yiddish, shifted to Spanish)

  —sie’s geveyn a picaflor!

  Frydka was a hummingbird!

  Shlomo beamed as he translated this, enjoying the image; then added one of his own. Yes! He nodded, smiling: he remembered her, too. She was a butterfly! he cried. Going from flower to flower!

  At this point, between Anna and Shlomo, a great deal of Yiddish buzzed and gurgled. Shlomo slapped his thigh and laughed.

  She told me two stories, he said. One: about Frydka she can say that she and some friends were once going over to Russki Bolechow. Now there was a guy who was renting a room there, they were curious about him. So they knocked on the door, and who was there when it opened? Frydka!

  I grinned. A butterfly! Well, I thought, who could blame her? I’d seen the pictures from Pepci Diamant’s albums. Frydka the moody teenager, mooning at her open photo album; Frydka on a brilliantly sunny day in a white dress and those open-toe shoes, squinting into the camera, tall and leggy; Frydka clowning in the bushes by the Sukiel River; Frydka scowling at the camera with her fingers to her finely carved lips, a pose nobody likes to be caught in, snacking on something delicious that her mother had prepared for her, a meal that turned to dust a lifetime ago. You could, I thought, get a crush on this girl.

  Anna excused herself to answer the phone, which had rung quite loudly at the end of this story, and while she was gone I talked about Frydka with Shlomo, who had worked in the Fassfabrik with her.

  You know, I said to him, I could tell from the pictures what Frydka was like, you could tell she thought she was a movie star—

  Shlomo nodded and pointed a thick finger at me in that Aha, I told you so! way that he has. And I am telling you, he said, that I think that I saw her myself in the Fassfabrik, because there were two beautiful girls in the Fassfabrik, which we already, youngsters, were aware of—because I was twelve and a half years till thirteen and a half, till thirteen actually, in that place—so I remember we saw, probably one was Frydka and another one was Rita, Rita was a girl of a refugee family which came to Bolechow. A Flüchtling, a beautiful girl. And the other one was Frydka. And I remember the two girls represented the women in the Fassfabrik. I remember, we would say, if somebody was beautiful, it was Frydka and Rita!

  Anna returned to the armchair. Did I want water, a soft drink, a Coke? Yes, I said, Coke would be great. While she was in the kitchen Shlomo went on with Anna’s second story about Frydka the butterfly, a story from darker times.

  It’s a little bit difficult to translate! he said, laughing loudly. He said: Anna said that during the war, when people were working in the factories, most of the girls worked outside. But Frydka, because she, you know, because she was free in such a way…she arranged for herself that she was working inside! In the camp, in the Lager, in the barrel factory…

  Well, I said, half-amused even as I spoke by my own reflexive impulse to protect the reputation of my long-dead cousin, We know from what Jack Greene told us, and from Shmiel’s letters, that Frydka had gone to a commercial high school to learn to be a bookkeeper. (Darling Frydka has finished high school, Shmiel had written, it cost me a fortune and where is one supposed to find a job for her? And again: Frydka has finished with the Commercial School in Stryj, she still has one more school to deal with; I’d like to have her learn a trade as I see fit, as today one is nothing without a trade…) And so, I went on, maybe that’s why she worked inside the camp building? After all, I thought to myself, hadn’t Jack said that she’d worked as a bookkeeper in the Fassfabrik?

  Anna came back with a large bottle of Coke and put it down on the table. Shlomo relayed my objection to her. Anna shook her head, smiling broadly, and told him something.

  She said no, Shlomo explained, Frydka didn’t work in an office, she didn’t do bookkeeping then, she worked at a machine. He turned once more to Anna and then turned back to me. He said, I told her that I sat next to Frydka inside that building and it was not so nice, it was very hard inside, but Anna said to me just now, No, no, it was nicer than working outside in the freezing winter!

  Ess var shreklikh kalt! Anna said to me, knowing I wouldn’t need a translation. It was horribly cold!

  I remembered my endless conversations with Andrew, years earlier, in which we’d wonder how my grandfather would have fared, had he too been trapped in Bolechow during the war; about whether his wonderful ability to finagle what he wanted, to sweet-talk his way into and out of things, was unique to him, or was the expression of some characteristic that had once flourished in our family but seemed (for this was the unspoken feeling that lay behind our interest) to have died out. Now Shlomo had said, not without admiration: She arranged for herself to be working inside!

  She should have lived today! Anna repeated.

  I smiled. Yes, I thought, this was definitely a girl you could get a crush on.

  I WANTED TO return to the pictures, to the one photograph of her friend Lorka that we had. But just as I was reaching into the folder to pull out the enlargement of that group picture, now just under seventy years old, Anna said something to Shlomo. I heard the names Shmiel and Frydka. Would we always be talking about Frydka? I thought.

  Then Shlomo said, Aha!

  He turned to me. She said (he told me) that she heard, somewhere, probably that Frydka and Shmiel were hidden somewhere and somebody gave them up and they were killed.

  Frydka and Shmiel? I repeated, stupidly. Anna looked and me; it was clear she could tell that I had heard a different story. She nodded, looking at me, and went on.

  Zey zent behalten bay a lererin…

  Shlomo listened and then translated, although I was able to make out the story. He said, They were captured at the home of a schoolteacher. It was a teacher who learned them how to make drawings.

  An art teacher, I said.

  Yes, he said. An art teacher. A Polish woman.

  Did she know the name of this teacher? I asked. I wanted something concrete, something specific that would pin the story down.

  Anna talked more to Shlomo, who shook his head. No. But as they went on talking, I heard a name I knew well: Ciszko Szymanski. I looked up, wide-eyed. For anyone who spends too much time in archives, doing research about obscure events that have long since faded from the memories of everyone except, maybe, a very few old people, it is gratifying to have independent confirmation of the stories you’re pursuing. So she, too, had heard the story about Ciszko Szymanski. Anna smiled and nodded, and said something to Shlomo.

  She says Ciszko Szymanski was Frydka’s boyfriend, Shlomo said.

  I told Shlomo to tell her that Meg Grossbard in Sydney wouldn’t tell us anything—I turned to Anna and said gurnisht!, Nothing!, and she smiled—because Ciszko wasn’t Jewish. Shlomo translated this for Anna, who turned to me and made an incredulous expression, frowning and spreading her arms wide, as if to say, Who could possibly care anymore?

  I told her that we had heard from Jack Greene that Ciszko Szymanski was executed for having tried to help Frydka. She clearly understood what I was saying, because before I was finished speaking she looked at me and said, in Yiddish, Yes, that’s what I heard.

  It was at that point that she leaned across the low table toward me, that way a woman might lean over to confide a bit of gossip to a girlf
riend, and said something very quickly. The tension between the intimacy of her gesture and the strangeness of having to wait for Shlomo to translate struck me, at that moment, as significant: it seemed like a symbol for everything I was feeling that day—the strangeness at having to process, all at once, impossible distances of time and language and memory, together with the immediacy and vividness of the small but moving fragments I was hearing, just then, about my long-dead relations. Come, take some strawberries! He was deaf! A butterfly!

  Shlomo listened to what Anna said, as she leaned over so confidingly, and then turned to me.

  Shlomo said, She said that when they were caught, Ciszko said, If you kill her, then you should kill me too!

  For a moment nobody said anything. I knew, of course, that Frydka had inspired much more than a crush: That boy paid with his life for it, Jack had said in Sydney. But it was something, now, to overhear the fervor, the youthful bravado, of this lost boy’s words. If you kill her, then you should kill me too! And they did kill him; that much everyone agreed on, although it would be two years before I found out exactly how.

  I said, How does she know all this?

  Shlomo and Anna talked, and then he said to me, She heard this from her cousin, he was in Kfar Saba but now he’s in Haifa. He had been in Russia but he came back and he was living in Bolechow right after the war. He was one of those who built the memorial at Taniawa. So he knew a lot—how, what, where things happened. They spoke, you know, the ones who came back spoke after the war, right after the war, they spoke to the Ukrainians.

  Shlomo paused and said, just to me, There were so many things that I didn’t ask—that I didn’t ask. You know, I’m wondering. Today I want to know more things than I wanted to know then.

  He took a breath and then returned to the subject of Anna’s cousin, who had heard about Ciszko Szymanski’s last words. So, Shlomo said, speaking of this cousin, he knew, he knew a lot, and this is what he heard.

  What happened to the cousin? I asked. I was suddenly excited: if he were in Haifa, I could take the train up there, talk to him, perhaps there were other details he might remember.

  There was a rather prolonged exchange with Anna. Shlomo turned to me. He said, She says his mind is not clear anymore. She said that he was talking recently to her on the telephone and he said to Anna, “I just talked to my cousin,” and she said, “Which cousin?” and he said “Anna,” and she said, “I am Anna.”

  So: I wouldn’t be talking to the cousin.

  During all this, I suppose that my emotions were pretty transparent: the moving detail about the fate of Ciszko and Frydka (if it was true), and, even more in a way, the fact that there was an important variant of the story I had heard in Australia, of the story about Shmiel’s fate that had been told to me by the four Sydney Bolechowers, who were absolutely convinced that Shmiel had been taken, with his wife and youngest daughter—really the youngest—in the second Aktion, and had perished at Belzec. It took me a moment to sort through the feelings that this sudden shift in my assumptions had produced. On the one hand, it was disconcerting; I was beginning to become aware of how fragile each story I heard really was. (Look, someone would tell me, much later, how does anyone who survived know for sure? It’s just what someone told them. They weren’t there. If they survived, they were already in hiding when it happened….) On the other, I felt the strange exhilaration you can feel when faced with a particularly challenging mystery story, or crossword. What had happened to Uncle Shmiel, then?

  My face must have betrayed my feelings. Du sehst? Anna said, her gentle eyes on my face, that soft, private smile hovering around her lips. Ich veyss alles.

  You see? I know everything.

  FINALLY, WE GOT down to looking at the picture of Lorka.

  I have a picture of Lorka, I told her. It was Lorka I had come to find out about, although most of our conversation, most of the vivid memories, had ended up being about Frydka. I wondered, briefly, if there had been some sibling rivalry between Lorka, the responsible older sister, the one who was so faithful and true, and her wild (or so I thought) younger sister, whose personality seemed more real to me, more concrete and vivid, with each story I heard about her.

  Pictures fun Lorka? Anna said, eagerly. She went into the bedroom to get her glasses. When she returned, I triumphantly held up the sixty-nine-year-old photograph. There they were again, frozen in their mourning for my great-grandmother: Shmiel, Ester, Ester’s brother Bruno Schneelicht, and four girls who were, I was now certain, the nine-year-old Ruchele, the five-year-old Bronia, the fourteen-year-old Lorka—the tall one standing at the back, crouching to get into the picture, with her long, shy, somewhat serious face, not at all unattractive, but not nearly as vivaciously pretty as Frydka’s—and, half cut off by the edge of the picture frame, Frydka, aged twelve.

  Anna held up the picture with both hands and looked at it for a moment. Confidently, she pointed to Ester and said, duss ist di mitter fun Lorka, and I said, Yes, this is Lorka’s mother. Anna looked up at me and, making a negating movement with the flat of her hand, said, Ester was not from Bolechow, she was from Stryj. From my own research I knew this statement was true, but I was moved to see that she knew this small fact, something she’d gleaned from some childish conversation that took place seventy years ago and had, mysteriously, retained a lifetime later. I nodded and said, Stryj, and she smiled and said to me, So you know!

  She returned to the picture and said, as she scrutinized it with a frown, Di kinder, zi kenn ikh nokh nikht.

  The children, I don’t recognize them anymore.

  I pointed out Lorka to her with my finger. She pulled the picture back toward her and, looking at it intently, asked what year it had been taken. Nineteen thirty-four, I said. I know this for a fact. Zur Erinnerung an den ersten Monat wo ich nach unser gottseligen Mutter trauerte. Bolechów in August 1934. Sam. As a souvenir of the first month of my mourning for our blessed mother, Bolechow, August 1934. Sam. My great-grandmother, Taube Mittelmark Jager, died on July 27, 1934. Taube. Years ago, when I was a child, a family moved into the house next door, and when my mother met the wife, whose name was Toby, my mother smiled and said, My grandmother’s name was Taube. It means “dove.”

  From this photo, taken to commemorate the first month of mourning for this delicate-boned, indeed rather dovelike woman, whose face stares out with the exact same expression of sadness in all of the photos we still have of her, Anna turned away and looked at Shlomo emphatically.

  What did she say? I asked Shlomo, getting nervous.

  She said, I don’t think this is Lorka. She said she sees Lorka in her mind, and this is not Lorka.

  He turned back to her for confirmation. Nayn? Anna made a clucking sound three times with her tongue, no no no. Then she turned to me and said, in Yiddish, Who told you this is Lorka?

  Mayn zeyde, I said, a little hesitantly. My grandfather. He was the one who had let me pore over the albums from which all these photos had come, three decades ago; he was the one who had told me everything I knew about the family history, his family history, the stories and jokes and dramas, the names that went with the unsmiling faces in those old pictures. Of course it was Lorka, I thought; there are four girls there, and clearly the one I had pointed to was the oldest.

  Mayn zeyde, I repeated, more confidently.

  Anna smiled her sad smile at me, but was firm. Dayn zeyde hut zi gekeynt? she said.

  Your grandfather knew her?

  What could I say?

  I said, No.

  THE DISCUSSION OF what Lorka looked like seemed to trigger an important memory in Anna, who suddenly became quite emotional. Her voice thickened, as she turned first to me and then to Shlomo, speaking heatedly, gesturing with her hands: pointing, lifting them up as if to call God to witness, and, finally, circling her own torso, as if in an embrace. Finally she stopped talking, and looked at me expectantly, waiting for Shlomo to translate.

  Ah, Shlomo said, you see? You remember that I told y
ou that everybody was for himself, egotistic?

  I remembered: the day before, when I had interviewed him, when he had told me how he and his cousin Josef had hidden, after the rest of their families had been killed, and had survived together; had told me how, because his mother was so frum, so devout, she had abandoned her hiding place in order to make Pesach, Passover, and had been caught and taken away, how he had tried to go with her, and how, to spare him the sight of whatever might happen to her, she had sent her little boy back to their house to fetch her some warm socks, and when he’d run and gotten them and then returned to where she’d been, she was gone—when Shlomo was telling me all this, the day before, he’d said that one of the things that the Occupation did to people was to make them secretive, even with friends and loved ones. People who were planning to go into hiding, he’d said, with a look that was both knowing and mournful, knew that their chances of survival were better if as few people as possible knew what they were planning. I didn’t even try to imagine what it would have been like to have to practice this kind of passive deceit with people you loved—people who, you must have known, would die if they weren’t making plans like the ones you were keeping from them.

  You see? Shlomo said again, that day we were talking to Anna Heller Stern. Nobody wanted to tell, nobody who was going to hide! And she was a close friend of Lorka, they were working in the Fassfabrik together. Anna told me that on the day that she knew she was going to escape, they were walking, on the way to work in the factory. And she told me that she suddenly said to Lorka, Lorka, let’s embrace each other, give each other a kiss, because God knows when we will see each other again.

  That was the last she saw of Lorka.

  We were all silent for a few moments. Then I asked, When was this? Shlomo and Anna talked for a minute, and then he said, It was in November of ’forty-two.

  He added: In ’forty-two she left Bolechow and was hiding. She said she knows about what happened to Lorka, how she escaped and how she was with the Babij, and then she was probably killed. She said she heard about Frydka, she heard about Frydka and Shmiel, that they were together in hiding. But she doesn’t know how exactly Lorka was killed or Frydka.