The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  So we had gone to Sweden, as we had promised an incredulous Meg we were willing to do. And yet we still had only had fragments of a picture that, it was starting to appear, would never be whole. She just doesn’t want to say anything either way, Ewa had said, when we’d asked Klara which of the two entirely incompatible stories about Frydka was more likely to be true, the one in which she’d run to the partisans or the one in which Ciszko had been hiding her. She thinks that the second—the other one, with the attic, and somebody told the Germans—is most close to the truth. The first one, about the partisans, she never heard about it.

  It wasn’t until a year after I’d returned to New York from that trip, one night when I was watching the videotape of this interview for the third or fourth time, that I realized that I’d never said anything about an attic.

  BECAUSE I NEVER like having to go back and revisit places I’ve just been, it may have been the fact that I’d recently been in Israel; or perhaps it was the grueling trip to Stockholm; or perhaps it was Klara’s unexpected, frank acknowledgment of the psychological suffering she’d endured in her life; or perhaps, even, it was the sense, after we’d talked to her three days running, that there was not much left to be learned; perhaps it was any or all of these that gave to our week in Israel an aura of melancholy.

  There was something else, too, which we couldn’t know about until we landed at Ben Gurion Airport and had checked into our hotel. After Matt and I had settled into our rooms, the first thing I did was to call Shlomo: I wanted to confirm our various appointments over the next few days, which as usual he had very helpfully arranged. It was in the course of doing so that he told me that Dyzia Lew had flown back to Belarus only days before.

  What? I was furious, but tried not to show it. We’d scheduled this entire trip to coincide with Dyzia’s stay in Israel.

  What happened? I asked, attempting to control my voice.

  The treatment wasn’t working, Shlomo told me. So she went back.

  He didn’t have to say, To die. Anyway, it wasn’t Shlomo’s fault; there was nothing to do but carry on. So I held my tongue, and we went over the itinerary he’d organized. But a certain sadness now clung to this trip more tightly than ever.

  It was there when we went back to Beer Sheva to photograph Shumek and Malcia Reinharz. Once again, Malcia had prepared an enormous meal; once again, we sat talking and she smiled and spoke her forceful if broken English and thrust more food on us. Once again, Malcia shared her memories, this time for Matt’s sake: that Shmiel had been toip, deaf, that Ester had had two such pretty legs! That there had been only two girls, as far as she knew, and that they were a nice family, a handsome family. But this time it was as if she, too, were feeling depleted: her mood was far more pensive now than it had been when I’d interviewed her in June, and she tended, this time, to finish her sentences with a little sigh. She continued reminiscing, bringing out the memories in no particular order. She recalled the card games her parents had played: Rummy, Sixty-Six, something called Der Rote König, the Red King. The movies they used to go see on Saturday afternoons, when they’d sit in the more expensive seats, in the third row, with the lawyer Dr. Reifeisen who was nearsighted and who, I knew, although not from Malcia, had hanged himself from a beam in his office soon after the Germans came. Greta Garbo movies, Malcia remembered; Jeanette MacDonald! She remembered Bruckenstein’s, the restaurant that was owned by a pianist who was blind and who, during the first Aktion, in the Dom Katolicki, was ordered to play sprightly tunes on a piano that had been placed on the little stage while the Gestapo men put out the eyes of Rabbi Landau and forced the other rabbi who was there, Horowitz, to get up on that stage and lie naked atop some terrified naked girl as my mother’s cousin Ruchele lay cowering and listening, hours before her short life came to an end. She recalled how she and the other Bolechowers used to walk everywhere, as far as Morszyn, far into the woods where they would gather…Erdbeeren?—

  Strawberries, I said.

  Strawberries, she said, enunciating the word slowly, und Blaubeeren—

  Blueberries, I said.

  Blueberries, Malcia said. Strawberries and blueberries and everyberries! She burst out laughing at her own joke, and then suddenly became wistful again. Oh, it was nice, it was nice. It was a life. It was, and it will never be again.

  Sixteen again I’ll never be, till apples will grow on a cherry tree.

  It was at this point that Shumek Reinharz said he wanted to show us something that maybe Matt would want to photograph. He got up slowly from the dining table to fetch something from his bedroom. Malcia went into the kitchen and returned with an enormous apple strudel she’d been baking. Matt did something with his camera, and I took advantage of the lull in the conversation to boast to Malcia that Matt had just been named one of the top ten wedding photographers in the country. She made delighted noises, and then Shumek returned and held out a bunch of yellowed papers to me. I took them carefully, almost gingerly: I know how fragile old paper can be. One, roughly the size of a passport, had a swastika on the front and said, in block letters, PASSIERSCHEIN. It was, I immediately recognized, the safe-passage document that had allowed him, as a “useful worker,” to walk the streets of Bolechow without getting killed. Inside there was a big letter W, and I remembered what Jack and Bob had told me in Sydney, how the work force had been divided into R’s and W’s; and remembered, too, how Bob and Meg had bickered about what W stood for. I handled this piece of paper and Shumek looked at me and said, Wehrmacht! Wehrmacht! and pointed at his chest. It was odd and exhilarating to handle a concrete object connected to what had been, until then, a story. I remembered that day in Ukraine, two years earlier, when Matt had glimpsed the tombstone on which the name JÄGER was written, and which turned out to be the tombstone of my grandfather’s relative Sima Jäger, whom I’d known about for years from my Internet research but who hadn’t seemed quite real until that moment.

  I handed the Passierschein to Matt, who positioned it on the table and took a few pictures of it. But it was the next document Shumek handed me that caused to descend once again the sadness that seemed to adhere to this Israel trip. Every year, Shumek explained through Malcia, in order to continue receiving reparations from the German government, he had to present this document. I scanned the German print on the piece of paper. It said that he, Solomon Reinharz, had endured certain privations and losses during the Nazi occupation of Bolechow, and that as a result he suffered from ongoing Panik, Angst, Spannung.

  I turned to Matt and translated. Panic, Fear, Tension.

  Malcia said, Every year he must present this certificate, to prove that he is alive!

  Matt flashed his wide grin and said, Ask him how does he prove that he’s alive!

  Everybody laughed, but there lurked behind the joke an unfunny and complicated history, and we all knew it. Soon afterward, the eighty-nine-year-old Shumek drove us all to the shoe store that he and Malcia had run since 1950, and Matt started taking pictures.

  The sadness still clung two days later, when we went to Haifa to take pictures of Josef Adler.

  We’d spent the earlier part of that Saturday at another giant family reunion at Elkana’s place, a lunch party at which, it seemed, even more first and second and third cousins had shown up than the last time. This time Elkana’s sister, Bruria, had come from Haifa. She turned out to be a fine-boned woman who wore her dark hair in a pageboy; she had brought from her home her mother’s fabled photo album, the one over which, thirty years earlier during my parents’ only trip to Israel, my mother had exclaimed, crying, Oh, Daniel, you should see the pictures Aunt Miriam has, Aunt Jeanette’s wedding picture, her dress is made completely of lace! And yet now, sitting in Elkana’s living room, I looked through this fabled object at last and soon realized that nearly every picture in it, with the exception of that wedding photo (a photograph that, of course, could never even begin to suggest the tragedies and dramas that had resulted in that particular wedding) was merely a copy of a p
icture that we had back home in New York. It was obvious that Shmiel had sent identical copies of the various photographs taken of his family over the years to all his siblings, precisely the way that I and my own siblings do. To this disappointment was added the dismay I felt as I leafed through a number of quite old-looking, frayed photographs that I did not recognize, photographs that bore no labels or inscriptions of any kind, including a very ancient one of an Edwardian-looking man who, I wildly thought, could be my great-grandfather Elkune Jäger. When I held these mysterious images up to Bruria, whose English is as limited as my spoken Hebrew is, she shook her head sadly and made a little shrug. So all these, I thought, looking at the mute faces, all these are utterly lost, impossible to know.

  I realized, too, as I looked through Aunt Miriam’s famous album, that my grandfather had owned many more pictures of Shmiel’s family than, it seemed, Uncle Itzhak had owned. It occurred to me that there were two possible reasons for this: first, that because Uncle Itzhak had lived and worked so closely with Uncle Shmiel, he didn’t need to have souvenirs of his older brother; or, alternatively, that because Uncle Itzhak left for Palestine under a cloud of skandal!, the two brothers didn’t communicate afterward. As I sat on Elkana’s sofa wondering about this, a line from one of Shmiel’s letters came back to me: What does dear Isak write to you from Palestine? It had never occurred to me, until now, why Shmiel, in Poland, had to ask for news of Itzhak, in Palestine, from my grandfather, who was in New York. Then again, Shmiel calls Itzhak der lieber Isak, “dear Itzhak,” so how estranged from him could he really have been? Impossible to know.

  After we’d finished with the album, we went into the big communal dining room and ate. Once again, the meal began with a toast by Elkana, who slowly got to his feet and, looking at me with his narrowed pasha’s eyes, that amused and knowing look with which he would make his pronouncements about politics, delivered with a certain self-confident swagger that I recognized from my childhood, or would bid you farewell—They will find him in Tikrit! All ze best!—raised an eyebrow as he raised his glass and said, L’chaim and here’s to Dehniel’s book, he must finish it already and zen come back to Israel just to visit us and not always to interview! Once again, two dozen or so people, with most of whom I had almost nothing in common, not geography or language or politics or personality, apart from a certain set of genes that were, even as we sat there, being diluted with each new generation, sat down to an enormous meal of fried whitefish and chulent and tsimmes and kasha varnishkes, the kind of food, my cousin Gal leaned over and told me, that young Israelis refer to as “Polish,” not because it is in fact Polish but because “Polish” is the word they use, with the tiniest flicker of a perhaps dismissive irony, to refer to the mores and manners of what, in my family, is referred to as “the Old Country,” which is to say nearly all of Jewish Europe from Germany to Siberia. Oh sometimes she’s just so Polish! this same cousin said, affectionately, of her overprotective mother, who is my second cousin Anat: the granddaughter of Itzhak, Isaac, as I am the grandson of Avrumche, Abraham.

  It was Anat and her husband, Yossi, in fact, who, after this big reunion had ended in flurries of hugs and kisses, some genuine, some merely polite, drove us from Tel Aviv to Haifa, where Josef Adler was waiting for us. As we drove north away from Elkana’s, where after lunch Matt had paused to take some pictures of the family, the family, Matt and I talked about the Dyzia Lew disaster and whether it was possible, or even desirable at that point, to fly to Minsk to interview her.

  Well, I did already interview her, I said, trying to convince myself as much as him. Is there really a point? She already told me that she didn’t know them that well, that she didn’t know Shmiel or Ester at all, that she only knew Frydka but wasn’t close to her. And frankly that story about Frydka being pregnant by someone else doesn’t fill me with confidence, I have to say. So is this woman really worth schlepping to Minsk?

  I added, after a moment, From what I hear, Belarus makes Ukraine look like Paris.

  We pulled up in front of Josef Adler’s house on a quiet street on a hill in Haifa. A lone child played by a parking sign; a cool evening wind pushed an empty paper coffee cup across the street. A few months earlier, Josef had mentioned to me on the phone, when I’d called to get his address, that there had been a terrible suicide bombing in this very neighborhood. A bus had been blown up. But now it was quiet. Apart from the child, there wasn’t a soul on the street. That week, I’d noticed that the newspapers and televisions were free of violence; the big story in the papers just then was about the attempts by the descendants of the Wertheim family, once the richest Jews of Berlin, to get reparations for the vast holdings that had been seized by the Nazis, including the land on which a new office complex for the German Bundestag, the Parliament, which had been dedicated on the day we’d arrived in Tel Aviv, had been built. BUNDESTAG’S SHAKY FOUNDATIONS, read the headline in Haaretz on the day we met with Josef Adler.

  We went to the front door, where Josef was waiting. Once again, he was dressed with an almost military neatness. But this time—partly because of the fact that he was in his own comfortable home, and partly because of the presence of his wife, Ilana, a slim, good-looking brunette who looked far younger than her age and whose voice had, as do the voices of many Israeli women, a certain appealing bitterness to its timbre, a note like the rind of an orange—this time he seemed more relaxed, more expansive than he had six months earlier, when he had retailed for me, crisply and with a scholar’s dispassion, the history of Bolechow under the Occupation. After introductions were made, we all sat down around a low table and Ilana brought out a pot of coffee and an enormous brass platter heaped with nuts and fruits: oranges, dates, figs. We drank the bitter coffee and ate the fruit and talked.

  For the wife’s sake, I described once again what our project was, and what we had hoped to achieve. Because there was something about this couple that appealed to me, I wanted to say something that would please her, and would be true. After talking for maybe twenty minutes about the Bolechow project, I said, I must tell you I was very happy I spoke to Mr. Adler the last time I was here. I went on, saying how impressed I had been, on my last trip, that her husband had taken the trouble to drive all the way from Haifa to my hotel room in Tel Aviv to talk to me. I said how important it was for people to be so forthcoming, so generous with their memories. I described how, in some cases, it took more than one interview to establish a rapport with people. I smiled and described how we’d called Meg Grossbard every day when we were in Sydney, trying to persuade her to talk to us, and then how lovely and excited she’d been when we finally got to her brother-in-law’s little apartment. And even then, I added, she was very reluctant to say anything about the war, anything at all about her family.

  Josef looked at me from across the low table and said, She had a good reason for that.

  Matt and I exchanged confused looks and Matt said, What was the reason for that?

  In an even voice Josef said, Her brother was a member of the Jewish police, and he had not such a good reputation for that.

  Matt and I exchanged looks. I know nussink, Meg had joked. I see nussink. I thought of Anna Heller Stern who, during my last visit, had said that she was more afraid of the Jewish police than of anyone; thought, too, how much easier it is, often, to be cruel to those with whom we are truly intimate, the ones we know too well. Cain and Abel, I’d thought as I listened to Anna. Siblings. I thought, Maybe Ciszko Szymanski wasn’t the only thing Meg didn’t want to remember.

  What was his name? we both asked simultaneously.

  Lonek, Josef said.

  Not such a good reputation?

  Josef was philosophical. Well, you know, today it’s very hard to judge such things.

  I made an emphatic gesture. I’m not judging! I judge no one, I said. And it was true. Because it is impossible to know certain things, because I will never experience the pressures that people experienced during the war years, the unimaginable choices that h
ad to be made, because of all this, I refuse to judge. Still, there was this new thought, as I sat there eating sweet dates and figs: All those years of knowing nothing about Shmiel and all the rest had provoked in me a terrific yearning to know, to have facts and dates and details; and yet it had never occurred to me that the facts and dates and details I learned might add up to something more than entries in a chart or elements in a story—that they might one day force me to judge people.

  I said, I want to emphasize my business is not judging. I judge no one. I can’t be in 1942, I don’t know what it was like, people did what they did, they were under unimaginable pressure and stress.

  Josef said, It’s complicated. There were some Jewish police who were good, and some were bad.

  I said, Of course it’s complicated.

  Josef sighed and said, With Lonek Ellenbogen—

  (Meg’s maiden name, I knew, had been Ellenbogen, which in German means elbow, a name that might strike you as the most bizarre surname imaginable were it not for the fact that, as even a cursory search through the Jewish Records Index–Poland database on jewishgen reveals, a name that was just as common was Katzenellenbogen, cat’s elbow)

  —with Lonek it was like this. We were in this forced labor camp, Shlomo and myself. Shlomo’s cousin, Moishele, he was brought from the Stryj ghetto. He met with us. But the day they decided to liquidate the Stryj ghetto—in Stryj—they also arrested people who had been sent from Stryj to work in the labor camp in Bolechow.

  In Sydney, months before, Jack Greene had told me a story about Dolina, my great-grandmother’s hometown, a place whose World War II monument today, because it was erected by the Soviets, makes no mention that the people lying in the mass grave behind what used to be the town’s synagogue—today it is a Baptist church—were Jews. Even after there were several Aktionen in Bolechow, he’d said, his voice still filled with a certain bemusement, even after two years, when the Germans had killed four, five times in Bolechow, the Jews of Dolina weren’t touched. This, Jack told me, had confused and enraged Bolechow’s surviving Jews, who thought that maybe the Dolina Judenrat was doing something right that the Bolechow Judenrat wasn’t. And then, Jack reminisced, one night the Germans came and liquidated the whole town of Dolina all at once. The whole town! That’s the German…procedure, logic, I don’t know what to call it. Now, in Haifa, listening to Josef Adler talk about the Stryj Aktion, I thought, Here it was too: liquidating the Jews of Stryj didn’t mean merely killing the Jews who happened to be in Stryj. German logic.