Look, Malcia said. We could work till Juni ’forty-three.
July! Shlomo exclaimed. Not June, July!
And after, the Germans said that now they are building a new Lager and everybody will be saved. But they just wanted to take everybody in one Lager. And that was the end.
I nodded. Jack had already told me how those who’d fallen for the Germans’ ruse had all been locked in the new camp and killed. Guns, he had said. Fire.
But at that point, I went on, instead of going in this Lager, Szymanski hid Frydka in his house?
Malcia nodded. Yes.
So Szymanski was hiding her in his house, and this was after June ’forty-three.
Another nod.
July, Shlomo said.
July ’forty-three, I said. And so at some point after July ’forty-three she was hiding in his house.
(Again, I wanted specifics.)
And does anybody know where was his house?
As had occasionally happened before, I noticed that my syntax had vaguely changed, now that I was speaking with Bolechowers.
I know where, Malcia said. Not far from Frydka’s house. It was on the beginning of the street—
I took out the map of Bolechow that Shlomo had sent me. Malcia looked at it and asked where Dlugosa Street was. Then she pointed with a little cry of victory.
Yes! Here was the Jägers and here—
(she pointed to a spot on the same street but the opposite side)
—was the Szymanskis, at the beginning of the street.
So he lived on the corner, down the street, I said. That was where she’d been hiding. That was the place. I knew the story by now; now I wanted a place, a spot to stand on, if I ever went back to Bolechow.
Shlomo, Solomon, and Malcia were talking in Yiddish and German about the liquidation of the Lagers in the late summer of 1943—which is to say, the liquidation of the town, since by that time the only Jews left who weren’t in hiding were those in the last Lager. By that point, I knew, the Reinharzes were hiding, immobile but alert, in the German officers’ recreation hall, the Kasino, right in the middle of town.
Am vier und zwanzigsten August, Malcia was saying, in German now. Dann is meine schwester gegangen: und jeden Schuss haben wir gehört.
On the twenty-fourth of August. That’s when my sister went. And we heard every shot.
They were in hiding, Shlomo explained to me, although I knew the story.
Malcia nodded and said to me, in English, And every, every—
She turned to Shlomo. Unt yayden shuss hub’ ikh getzuhlt.
Yiddish, again. I understood. And I counted every shot.
She turned to me but continued in Yiddish. Noyn hindert shiess hub’ ikh getzuhlt.
Nine hundred shots I counted.
She paused and said, in English now, And after they came to the Kasino to wash their hands and to drink! I was right there, I saw them! They washed the hands and they went to drink!
Shlomo, who was as obviously moved as I was at the image of the two hidden Jews, cramped in their tiny hideout, unable to see but counting, counting, one after the other, the shots that were ending the lives of their friends and neighbors, turned to Malcia and said, And you knew what was happening?
Malcia pointed with her forefinger to her temple. She said, We imagined.
I, TOO, WAS imagining at that moment. We had arrived around noon, and it was now nearly three; I had much to think about. It wasn’t just the new and sensational additions to Frydka’s story—she was pregnant with his child, he was hiding her in his house—although these, like the sounds of the shots that Shumek and Malcia had heard that day, could not be ignored; they demanded, if anything, an effort of the imagination that couldn’t help but add to the story I wanted to be able to tell. They were lovers, they were deeply in love, these were desperate times, they were sleeping together, she was pregnant. He loved her that much—enough to endanger not only himself, but his entire family. Well, I thought, Good for her. Good for them. I’m glad she knew a profound love, before she died. To hell with what Meg Grossbard thinks; to hell with I know nussink, I see nussink!
And yet as important as this was, it was those other, smaller, less sensational details that I was thinking of when Malcia said We imagined. Here, too, there was much of interest to be extrapolated. He loved her so much! She had such pretty legs! These, too, were facts; these, too, might tell a little story. Perhaps it was her legs he’d first noticed, that day in 1918 when they’d met for the first time as adults, she a pretty twenty-three-year-old with her family’s regular features and solemn face, he an energetic young man, something of a war hero, determined to revive his father’s business. Perhaps he had seen her playing with her girlfriends, in the peaceful summer of 1919, down by the banks of the Sukiel, the place where their daughter would one day cavort with her girlfriends, just a few years before nearly all of them were raped or shot or gassed. Perhaps it was that small thing that had triggered their romance, a romance that had never, as we now know, ended. He loved her so much—au au au au!
It was while I was thinking about this business of imagining, of extracting the story from the small, concrete thing, that I realized that Malcia and Shlomo were reminiscing, after our huge lunch, about certain foods they used to eat, and which fewer and fewer people now knew how to cook. Ahhh, bulbowenik! Shlomo exclaimed. Shumek rolled his eyes in appreciation, and the other two started explaining to me what it was: a dish of grated potatoes and eggs that you baked and—
Wait! Malcia exclaimed. I think she was relieved not to be talking about the past anymore, after all this time. You’ll sit here a little while, and I’ll make it for you!
I gave Shlomo a look. We had to be back in Tel Aviv by seven, I reminded him, since a friend whom I’d met in the States, a philosophy professor at the University of Tel Aviv, was expecting me for dinner.
Shlomo smiled broadly and said something to Malcia, who shook her head impatiently. It’s nothing, it won’t take no time at all, he said.
I thought, Why not? This, too, was part of the story; and after all, it hadn’t often been the case that some abstract aspect of the lost civilization of Bolechow could so easily be made concrete. I grinned and nodded. OK, I said, let’s cook.
Malcia took me into the kitchen so I could watch. We grated potatoes, we beat eggs, we poured them into a baking dish. We sat for forty-five minutes while it baked. We took it out of the oven to cool. While it cooled, I thought to myself that we had just eaten an enormous lunch with lots of wine; I suspected that I was about to be taken to an enormous dinner.
Still, I’d been raised in a certain kind of home, and I knew what to do. I sat down at the table and ate. It was delicious. Malcia beamed. It’s a real Bolechower dish! she said.
Only after I’d had seconds did we finally get up to go.
SHLOMO AND I went back down the concrete stairs of the Reinharzes’ building to the parking lot. What with the impromptu cooking lesson, and then the tasting of the bulbowenik, we’d ended up staying much longer than we had thought we would. The sun, low on the horizon, was mellow, and when we got into Shlomo’s car we opened the windows. Shlomo was preoccupied, at first, with finding our way back to the highway from the apartment house on Rambam Street—a street, I was happy to notice, that was named after the great twelfth-century Jewish scholar and philosopher Maimonides (the acronym of whose Hebrew name, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, is RMBM). Rambam was a Spanish-born Jew whose family fled the anti-Jewish persecutions of the Muslim ruler of Spain and came, eventually, to Egypt, which is how Maimonides ended up becoming the esteemed servant of the enlightened sultan in Cairo. He is the scholar who, along with Rashi, is the most widely admired and studied of all Jewish intellectuals. The rationalist views expressed in his master-work, The Guide for the Perplexed—and, it’s hard not to think, the enormous renown that Rambam enjoyed—so enraged certain rival rabbis in France that they denounced him to the French Inquisition, while (by contrast) his death was mourned thro
ughout Cairo for three full days by Muslims. Where do you live, and what are your loyalties? parashat Lech Lecha asks; and no wonder.
As we navigated our way out of the Israeli street named for this remarkable man, we talked enthusiastically about our long interview with the Reinharzes.
So she was pregnant, I said to Shlomo as he peered at the street signs.
Well, it’s what she says, he replied. But it’s very interesting, no?
I nodded. Very interesting. I had gone to Australia not even knowing what stories we’d hear, and now it seemed I had a real drama on my hands. I wondered what Meg would say, if I decided to share this latest detail with her.
Soon we were out of the city and racing back toward Tel Aviv. We must have both been feeling depleted, after such a long day; I didn’t mind at all when, after some minutes of companionable silence, he flicked on the radio. A female voice was singing, and it took me a moment to realize that she was singing not in Hebrew, but in English. The tune was familiar, but at first I didn’t recognize the song for what it was because the verse was unfamiliar to me. I had only known the refrain, it now turned out. The woman’s voice had become the voice of a young girl, a girl who was narrating the story of her own death. She had died, she sang, for love of a boy who would not love her back. Then the voice slid into the refrain:
I wish I wish
I wish in vain
I wish I was
a maid again
but a maid again
I ne’er can be
till apples grow
on an ivy tree
I sat up, sputtering, and turned to Shlomo. This is the song! I finally shouted, This is the song! The one I was telling you about on the way here this morning. The song my grandfather sang!
We both listened as the voice came to the last verse, which caught my attention, perhaps because dying for love was much on my mind that hot early evening:
Oh, make my grave
large, wide and deep
put a marble stone
at my head and feet
and in the middle
a turtle dove
so the world may know
I died of love.
How on earth, I thought as I wrote these words down—something about the grave, the stone, the dove moved me, and made me want to remember this lyric—did my grandfather come across this song? Why had he learned it?
The song was over, and the radio announcer said something in rapid Hebrew. Shlomo said, It’s an Irish song.
How had Grandpa learned this? I thought again. And why?
Then Shlomo grinned even more broadly.
You know something else? he said. Something it’s another coincidence?
I shook my head no. I couldn’t imagine anything more uncanny than what had already happened.
Shlomo looked at me and said, You know who it is singing? It’s Nehama Hendel, the wife of Regnier, the one who wrote the Bolechow book.
I suppose my face was legible. Shlomo exhaled heavily, gestured broadly with his hand in a way that took in both the radio/cassette player of his car and the desert, and said, You see? You see? Israel is a country of miracles!
Not being a believer in miracles, I simply smiled and nodded silently. Then, when I got back to the Hilton, I did an Internet search for the following cluster of words: I WISH I WISH I WISH IN VAIN. Instantly, dozens of citations appeared on my screen, which is why it was a matter of just a minute or two before I learned the name of the song my grandfather had always sung to me when I was a child, a song that I’d always assumed was a song from his youth but that, I now realized, he must have learned at some unknowable point after he’d left Bolechow forever, and that must have touched him profoundly nonetheless for reasons I can only now guess at, among which may have been, simply, its title, a title that I’d never have known if I hadn’t come to Israel, and which was The Butcher Boy.
THAT WAS SUNDAY. On Tuesday I had scheduled an interview with Shlomo’s cousin Josef, who indeed came to my hotel room that day, a wiry, fit, military-looking man in his seventies, handsome and unsmiling, and in a steady and unsentimental voice talked for ninety minutes, more or less without interruption, about the fate of Bolechow’s Jews. I listened carefully, although it was a story I knew well by then, not only from my previous interviews but from the crisply informative chapters in the Bolechow Yizkor book about the war years, which had been written by Josef Adler himself. There was something about his demeanor that made me want his approval: perhaps it was his crisply creased tan pants and fresh khaki-colored short-sleeved shirt, which seemed impressively military to my eyes. When we sat down in the narrow hotel armchairs that I’d clustered around the desk, Josef Adler acknowledged right away that he hadn’t known my own family particularly well; but he wanted to make sure I knew what had happened. I nodded and let him speak. The arrival of the Germans. The first Aktion. The second Aktion. The Lager. The Fassfabrik. The final liquidation in ’43. The remarkable details of how he and Shlomo, two young boys, had survived. How he had come to Israel; how important Israel was. As he made this last point, this soft-spoken but emphatic and rigorous man, I felt ashamed of my long-standing lack of interest in modern-day Israel; I wondered if every American Jew traveling in Israel ended up, at some point, feeling like a draft dodger. When Josef was leaving, I thanked him fervently for driving all the way to Tel Aviv from Haifa, which he had insisted was no problem when we made the appointment to meet a few days earlier. It’s very important what you’re doing, he told me as we shook hands at the door of my room. It’s very important that people know what happened.
But that, as I’ve said, wouldn’t be until Tuesday. On Monday, we stayed in Tel Aviv. Froma, who’d been busy seeing relatives since we arrived in Israel, wanted me to see the Beth Hatefutsoth, the Museum of the Jewish Disapora, which is located on the starkly modern campus of Tel Aviv University. There’s tons to see there, she told me, We should get there early. We got there on a blazing late morning, just after the museum opened. The scattering of palm trees in front of the museum building itself did little to alleviate the almost aggressive monumentality of the building.
Inside the cavernous entrance hall it was cool. We paid our entrance fee and began to walk through the permanent exhibition, which begins with a reproduction of a bas-relief from the so-called Arch of Titus in Rome, which depicts the triumphant return home of the Roman legions who conquered Judaea in A.D. 70 and destroyed the Second Temple. On it, you can see what is recognizably a menorah, the great candelabrum used in the Temple, being borne away on the shoulders of sturdy Romans. This is a rather somber introduction to what the museum literature describes as its founder’s desire “to emphasize the positive and creative aspects of the Diaspora experience.” The latter are far more noticeable as you pass by the bas-relief and enter the exhibition proper. As with the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna, your experience of the Beth Hatefutsoth is organized around a series of “gates,” although in this case the gates are metaphorical: The Gate of the Family, the Gate of the Community, the Gate of Faith, the Gate of Culture, and so on. We passed through them, looking. I was particularly enthralled, as we walked through the various gates, by the splendidly large and astoundingly detailed scale models and dioramas with which the creators of the Beth Hatefutsoth have sought to evoke various aspects of Jewish life throughout the centuries of the Jews’ wandering. There are, for instance, remarkable models of synagogues throughout the world, from the eighteenth-century double synagogue of Kaifeng, China, which to my uneducated eye looked indistinguishable from any other Chinese building I’d ever seen, with its upward-curved eaves and slender painted columns, to the Tempio Israelitico in Florence, a grandiose domed Moorish affair that reminded me of something, as I stood there—some other doll-like restoration of a great Jewish place of worship for the edification of attentive if not necessarily Jewish visitors—until I realized that what I was thinking of was the Spanish Synagogue in Prague.
There was, too, a beautifully detailed re-
creation in miniature of the Great Synagogue of Vilna, in Lithuania, which was built in 1573, around the time that Jews first arrived in Bolechow, and consisted of a vast complex of schools, yeshivas, and places for prayer—which was only fitting, when you think about it, given that the Jerusalem of the North at one time boasted three hundred and thirty-three scholars who claimed to be able to recite the Talmud by heart—a vast complex that was destroyed in 1942, the same year that most of the Jews of Bolechow disappeared.
(After Froma and I left Israel, we flew, as it happened, to Vilnius, as it is now called, and it was toward the end of the week we were there, seeking out the few remaining traces of this greatest city of European Jewish scholarship, that we visited the tomb of the famous Vilna Gaon, a man so renowned for his learning during his lifetime in the eighteenth century that congregations from as far away as Portugal would anxiously but patiently wait for years to receive his responses to their questions about scripture or law. And it was while we stood at the grave of this great man that our guide informed us that in this tomb were also buried the bones of a Polish Catholic, the scion of an enormously rich and aristocratic family, a count, a Graf, who, under the Gaon’s tutelage, converted to Judaism and for that reason had been burned at the stake by the Catholic authorities. We politely scrutinized the Polish inscription on the tomb, and I read the name of this Graf aloud rather haltingly, pronouncing it phonetically. Poetahkee? I said, a bit tentatively, and the guide smiled and said No, no, the c is like a ts, it’s pronounced Pototski.)
To me, even more wonderful than the models were the equally detailed and beautiful dioramas, such as the one to be found in the section of the permanent exhibition called “Among the Nations,” which depicts the great tenth-century A.D. Babylonian sage Saadia Gaon holding forth in the palace of the caliph in Baghdad. Standing beneath the ornate and beautiful vaults of the palace, draped in a white robe, the tiny figure of the gaon has his left arm extended, as if making an important rhetorical point. And no wonder: the career of this remarkably learned man, who was Egyptian by birth—his real name, Said al-Fayyumi, hints at his origins in the Fayum in Upper Egypt—and became the star of the Babylonian gaonate, was peppered with important doctrinal, cultural, and intellectual controversies. Before he was forty, Saadia had brilliantly quashed an attempt by his archrival, Aaron ben Meir, the gaon of the Jewish community in the territory of Palestine, to challenge the authority of the Babylonian gaonate; the Palestinian’s efforts to introduce a new calendar soon disintegrated. Saadia also struggled against the widespread assimilation of the Arabic-speaking Babylonian Jews, a suave elite to whom the enlightened rationalism of the Greek philosophers, reintroduced through translations into Arabic, was proving seductive. In his groundbreaking work Kitab al-Amanat wal-l’tikadat, “Book of the Articles of Faith and Doctrines of Dogma” (now better known, for reasons that will be obvious, by the title of its Hebrew translation, Emunoth ve-Deoth, “Beliefs and Opinions”), Saadia—much influenced by the Motazilites, the rationalist dogmatists of Islam—for the first time laid out a systematic explanation of Jewish thought and dogma. Written in an elegant Arabic bound to appeal to his cosmopolitan audience, Saadia stressed the rational aspect of Judaism and suggested that the Torah had an intellectual appeal not at all different from the writings of the increasingly popular Greeks. As part of his project of clarification and elucidation of Jewish texts for the tastes of his assimilated, Arab-speaking fellow Jews, he also translated the Bible into Arabic, and added to it a lucid and appealing commentary: an achievement of enormous importance.
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million Page 42