The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  Insulted? Shlomo ventured.

  Still giggling, Malcia said in Yiddish, Zi is immer geveyn mit a hoch Nase.

  A high nose? I’d never heard the expression.

  Ah! Ah! Shlomo said. He turned and looked right at me. She says she kept herself, you know—as “somebody.” He took a finger and with it lifted up the tip of his nose in a universal gesture of snootiness.

  Why was that? I asked Malcia.

  She made a deprecatory face. Well, she knows that she was pretty, that she has a good home, good parents…

  What exactly was the reputation of the family? I asked, and at that she launched into a story. There was a charitable organization that her father had founded, she said, called Yad Charuzim, The Hand of the Diligent. She laughed. When my father was the president, she said, I would tell everyone, My father is the president! I grinned, and she added that Shmiel had been the president at one point, too. This explained, at long last, a photograph I’d seen years before in the Bolechow Yizkor book. In the bottom of the two photographs that appeared on page 282, my grandfather had written, were his two brothers Shmiel and Itzhak. In it, Shmiel is sitting, dressed in a dinner jacket with a wing-collar shirt and black bow tie, at the center of a large group of well-dressed men; sitting on the floor was Itzhak, holding up one end of a sign that must have borne the name of whatever club this was, but in the reproduction the only letters visible in the photograph are C H A. At that moment Malcia said something quickly to Shlomo, who left the table and went to a pile of papers. A moment later he returned and handed me a photocopy, on A-1 paper, that had clearly been made from the original of the image so faultily reproduced in the Sefer HaZikaron LeKedoshei Bolechow. The original, it now turned out, belonged to Malcia. On the photocopy the placard that Itzhak is holding is quite legible:

  ZAŁOZYCIELE

  19 JAD 28

  CHARUZIM

  BOLECHOW

  FOUNDERS OF THE YAD CHARUZIM, 1928, BOLECHOW.

  Malcia pointed to a face I knew well: handsome, aloof, sporting an impeccably trimmed toothbrush mustache that (I can’t help thinking) he thought would make him look older, more dignified. He was only thirty-three. Itzhak, by contrast, looks the faintest bit amused.

  Here, she was saying, now in this picture is Shmiel Jäger the president. And this is my father.

  She pointed to a dignified-looking man with pale eyes and a goatee sitting in the same row as Shmiel. And this is Kessler the carpenter, she went on.

  Once again, I was both moved and pained by the thought that each of these people had a family, a story; and that somewhere, somebody who was interested in, say, the Kessler family might be saying, And wasn’t that one Jäger the expediter, in the middle, he had the trucks? And isn’t that his brother, who had the butcher store, you remember the story…?

  Yes, Lorka had a good home, a good family, Malcia said, making a little shrug as her voice trailed off. I thought again of Shmiel and his letters to my grandfather.

  Not that I have to tell you, my dear ones, what even strangers say, which is that I have the best and most distinguished children in Bolechów…

  Or,

  People in Bolechów take me for a rich man (since I pay enormous taxes), and anyone who needs anything comes to Samuel Jäger. I have a lot of influence here and I’ve had preferential treatment everywhere, and so I have to present myself well everywhere. Indeed I spend time with the better class of people, I’ve been everywhere in town as an honored guest, and I’m continually traveling.

  Hoch Nase, I said. Malcia grinned and nodded, and I had no reason to disbelieve her. Everything, I thought, fit perfectly.

  At that point, Malcia served lunch, and we talked for a while of happier things.

  LATER ON, WHEN we’d finished the enormous meal that she’d prepared, Malcia said, And after, what happened in the Occupation, you know? I noticed that Shumek—Shlomo often called Solomon Reinharz by this Polish nickname—wasn’t making any move to return to work.

  I did know, by this point—or thought I knew—but as I’d done in Sydney, I asked her to remember for me what had happened and when. This time, though, I tried to think more like Matt. I asked her not just what had happened, but what people were thinking and feeling and saying.

  I said, When you knew that the Germans were coming, in the summer of ’forty-one, what were people saying before the Germans actually got there—what idea did people have of what it was going to be?

  Shumek and Malcia exchanged glances. She said, We knew, we knew, we knew. The first night that the Russians were out of Bolechow, our Ukrainer, our goyim, killed one hundred and twenty Jews and throwed them in the water.

  I nodded. I remembered Jack and Bob in Sydney, saying, The first thing that happened was that the Ukrainians came and they started to kill Jews. You know, if you had something with the Jews, you killed them.

  But what were people expecting from the Germans? I asked. How much did they know at that point? Exchanging a look with her husband, she said with a bitter little laugh, Alle gloybten duss di doytscher wirdn uns tzvingen in a fabrik. Everyone thought the Germans were going to force us into a factory.

  At that point I asked what people had known, in general, about the Germans’ plans for the Jews of Europe when the war started.

  Malcia said, again, We knew, we knew, we knew. In ’thirty-nine all the people, all the Jews, they went from Poland—this was the Polish gouvernement—and they run away.

  She suddenly put both hands to her face, remembering something. Oh! she said. And if you had seen the people with the small baggages, and the families—

  Meg Grossbard, too, had remembered seeing hordes of Jews, together with certain Poles, fleeing for their lives eastward and southward, toward the Soviet half of Poland, toward Hungary, driving and riding and walking as fast as they could after the Germans started bombing Warsaw that day in September 1939. Bolechow, Meg explained to me, was the last town before the frontier with Hungary; thousands of refugees had passed through the town as they sought shelter. Many, indeed, had simply stayed in Bolechow. The Flüchtling, they were called; those who were fleeing. Better to be under Soviet rule than under the Nazis.

  As if reading my thought, Malcia said, They run away to us. Not only from Poland, but from Czechoslovakia, from Austria. Because they knew we stayed under the Russian gouvernement. She shook her head again as she remembered and said, This picture I cannot forget.

  Shlomo suddenly interrupted at this point.

  Malcia, he said, you are a few years older than I. And you saw the pictures—the refugees—

  Oh, the refugees! she said, covering her face with her hands once more.

  And you remember that it was two years of quiet, from 1939 until 1941, Shlomo went on. And then you remember that people knew the Germans were coming.

  Malcia nodded, and Shlomo said with that emphasis he has, So why we didn’t run away as those refugees ran away?

  Malcia smiled humorlessly. Why, why? Ahhhh…Because you cannot leave a home! How can you leave a home?!

  How can you leave a home? I remembered, then, something else in Shmiel’s letters—how, as time passed, he kept oscillating between desperate fantasies of escape and proud refusals to leave. He would write to President Roosevelt, he wrote; he’d sell whatever he could, anything to get them out; to get the girls out; to get one of the girls out. The dear Lorka. And yet, often in the same letter, he’d change his mind. But I emphasize here to you all that I do not want to leave here without something to live on—conversely, I have, thank God, everything that I need…. I know now that I wouldn’t be able to get such a life very fast in America. I’d wondered, once, about these extravagant shifts of mood, but of course, that was years ago, when I was a teenager and young man, before I had a life, a house, children. Often, when I talk to certain people about the Holocaust, about what I’ve discovered about my great-uncle’s letters, his too-late realization that the world was locking down around him, his tardy efforts to escape, I find that t
hose who have the benefit of history, of hindsight, say what Shlomo had just now said—although Shlomo’s furious question was motivated by grief, not the complacent goodwill that comes of considering historical crises from the comfort of one’s own safe life. You wonder why they didn’t read the writing on the wall, people like to say. But as I’ve grown older, I don’t wonder that much, really. I don’t wonder, and nor, I saw, did Malcia.

  How can you leave a home?!

  Malcia got up to do something in the kitchen; we still hadn’t had dessert! she’d cried. While she was there, Shumek and Shlomo were speaking rapidly in Yiddish about other wartime memories. I tried to listen, but they were talking too fast. At one point, I heard Shlomo ask Shumek something about di Yiddishpolizianten, the Jewish militia that was conscripted in each town and forced, often, to do the occupiers’ dirty work: rounding up a certain number of people, say, or locating this or that Jew and taking him or her somewhere from which there would be no return. I had read, and now heard, that the Jewish police were often feared and detested by the people with whom they’d once lived as neighbors and friends. Anna Heller Stern had visibly reacted, two days earlier, when the subject of the Jewish police had come up. I was more afraid of them than anybody, she had said. But even as she’d done so, I thought to myself: If I thought I could save my family by joining the Jewish police, would I? I thought of my children and refused to make judgments.

  Anyway, as Shumek was now saying to Shlomo, the Jewish police were themselves hardly indispensable. Und vuss hut zey getin? Zey hutten zi alle geloysht.

  And what did they do? They liquidated them all.

  It was in this context that Shlomo asked about the fates of two such policemen whom he’d known. They were speaking rapidly, and I didn’t catch the names.

  Er is oykh geloysht geveyn? Shlomo asked. He also was liquidated?

  Shumek at that moment was wearing a gentle, somewhat resigned expression. Yaw, er oykh.

  At that point, Malcia entered with an enormous cake and, having listened to what her husband and Shlomo were talking about for a moment, turned to us and said, That’s enough. I don’t want to talk about mishugenah tzayten and mishugenah menshen.

  Crazy times and crazy people.

  She added, Who wants a nice cup of tea now?

  SO ABOUT THE Occupation you already know, Malcia was saying, after we’d eaten the dessert and had sat back, exhausted, in our chairs. As I’d done at Meg’s déjeuner à la Bolechow in Sydney, I thought, Soon there will be nobody left who cooks this food.

  Well, I said, we don’t really know. I mean, we know what happened in general, but we don’t know anything specific about what happened to them. I didn’t want to feed her any information; I wanted to see what she knew, unprodded.

  The Jägers, she said. What happened to them happened to everybody. She sighed.

  But immediately afterward she said, And Frydka, she has a relation with the son of a Polish man, the neighbor.

  Frydka again, I thought. What I said was, Ciszko Szymanski.

  She nodded. And there was somebody that—

  She turned to Shlomo for the word she wanted and said something to him.

  Someone who denunciated them, Shlomo said.

  Denounced, I said.

  Yes. Malcia nodded again.

  Frydka. After the conversation with Anna Stern, I doubted I could learn anything new; certainly nothing more dramatic and moving than If you kill her, you should kill me too! Still, I wanted to proceed in an orderly way.

  All right, I said, I want to go slowly here.

  But Malcia was remembering things, and pressed ahead with her story.

  They denunciated them, and they found her, and she was pregnant.

  Pregnant? I said. I sat up straight and looked at her.

  Pregnant? Malcia asked Shlomo, making sure it was the right word.

  He nodded. It was the right word. Pregnant.

  I said, Wait, I want to go back just one minute. Frydka was with the Polish boy, Ciszko Szymanski. They were going together, he liked her?

  Malcia said something to Shlomo, who turned to me and said, She says he saved her, he tried to hide her.

  Malcia nodded and resumed speaking to me in English. To hide her, she said. And they lived together.

  I wasn’t sure I understood; I wanted more specifics. They lived together where?

  Malcia said, In his, his house.

  He was hiding her in his house? I said, startled. This had never occurred to me.

  Malcia nodded, more to herself than to me. She said, Yes. And they found them, they found them and she was pregnant. So they told me.

  Shlomo, reading my thoughts, cut in. Tell me, he said to Malcia, and her father, Shmiel, was not there?

  She shook her head slowly and emphatically: No.

  He loved her very much, she went on, and he said her he want to hide her. He like her very much and she like him. And it was for her a, how we say, a mazel. And he hide her but, there was bad people that knew that they…

  Her voice trailed off. She looked pensive. Shlomo said, to me, So part of the story was true. Somebody gave up Frydka.

  Part of the story, I thought. And why did we think it was true? Because somebody else, somebody who hadn’t been there either when it happened, somebody who had hidden successfully and who’d also only heard about what happened to Frydka after the war was over, had heard it from somebody else, who’d heard it from someone else; and because a certain detail from that thirdhand story now dovetailed with a detail that Malcia had heard from someone who’d heard it from someone else. Frydka had been hidden and betrayed. But what about Shmiel, now? I felt like I was walking on quicksand.

  Betrayed her, Malcia said. Yes.

  And we have no idea who that was? I said.

  Malcia was matter-of-fact. She spread her hands. The neighbors. Ukrainer.

  I was still trying to adjust to this new version: no Shmiel, no nameless Polish schoolteacher, just Frydka and Ciszko. Shlomo must have read my thoughts, because he looked at me and then turned to Malcia and said, Because, you see, we heard a story that Frydka and Lorka went to Babij.

  Malcia made a very strong face of negation—of disdain even. No, no!

  OK, I said. So then the last that we know of Frydka is that she was hiding with him, and someone denounced them—

  Malcia nodded. They killed her and he, too. I saw his mother after the war.

  His mother? This was interesting. I asked, And what did she say?

  Malcia looked amused. What does she say? She said, He was a stupid boy!

  She gave me a subtle and complicated look. She said, He paid with his life, this.

  I wanted to keep pressing for more details. So you ran into Mrs. Szymanska after the war—

  We did not come to her, she came to us. We had a store after the war in Breslau—

  Wrocław? I asked. “Breslau,” I knew, is the old German name for what is now Wrocław, just as “Lemberg” is the old name for L’viv. Froma and I, exhausted from too much walking in Prague, had once disintegrated into tearful laughter over the difference between how the word looks to an English-speaker’s eyes, and how it’s actually pronounced: Vrotzwohf. It was only later that I learned how certain Polish letters are pronounced.

  Malcia nodded and grinned. Yes, Wrocław. She remembered the address where she’d lived, then. Rynek sześć. Ringplatz sechs. Market Square 6. Resuming the story about Ciszko Szymanski’s mother, she said, And she came in, she knew that we had a shop. Everybody looks for a face that he knows. Because she wanted to see us. She wept, she cried and we talked together.

  Malcia looked at me and, as if to explain the emotion she was recalling, said, People from Bolechow.

  Then she said, She talked about the son. She told how stupid he was!

  Malcia shouted the word stupid as Mrs. Szymanska had once done. She went on: He gived his life for this girl. But he loved her very much.

  Like mother, like daughter, I thought.

/>   She looked at me firmly. She said, And for her it was a mitziyeh, you know what it is a mitziyeh?

  I shook my head no, and she gestured, as she liked to do, with her right hand, thumb and first two fingers squeezed together, the way you might do when you want to indicate that a recipe needs a pinch of salt.

  Shlomo said, A mitziyeh—it’s something, something, you know, something special.

  (Later on, I looked up mitziyeh in the 1938 Hebrew-English dictionary that I inherited from my grandfather, and learned that it means this: a finding, a discovery; a thing found; a precious thing. It was interesting to learn, further, that it is connected to the verb mâtzâh, which means to find out, guess; to find; to come upon, meet, discover; to befall, happen. What kind of culture was this culture of the Hebrews, I wondered when I looked this up months after my interview with the Reinharzes that day, a culture in which the notions of coming upon and meeting and discovering were inextricably linked to the idea of preciousness?)

  Malcia nodded very vigorously and cried out, To stay alive! To stay alive! Who has such a mazel? Who has such luck?

  I thought, then, of something my mother had said to me in Sydney, after she’d finished talking to Jack Greene on my cell phone. Why didn’t my family survive? she had said, her voice filled with tears. Even just one of them? After I’d hung up, I had repeated this to Jack, who’d said, Look, it was just a matter of luck, that’s it. Now, as I listened to Shlomo and Malcia, it occurred to me that although she’d died, in the end, Frydka had still been lucky. She had lived that much longer, after all; had had someone who wanted desperately to save her, someone who died for her. A mitziyeh, a mazel only seems strange if you’re thinking about things in hindsight, which is a luxury that Frydka and Ciszko did not have.

  Shlomo said to me, Who knew that somebody would betray them?

  I WANT TO get the chronology straight, I said again, although this time I was referring to one Jew in particular: to Frydka. Now at that point she was living in one of the Lager, right? And then—