The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  So, Josef went on, anyway Lonek came with the Germans, the barracks were surrounded by SS and Jewish police, and Lonek entered and he recognized Moishele. He said, Moishele, you must come. And Moishele said, Have pity on me, you know me. Lonek said, You have to go, it’s your duty to go.

  Josef gave me a look. You see, Lonek was convinced that somehow he’s doing some kind of very important duty that he had to comply with. It was their duty to execute their own…And Moishele was taken away to the Rynek and they shot him.

  We listened in complete silence. Then Matt said, What happened to her brother, to Lonek?

  Josef said, He was also killed in the cemetery. He tried to run away, but I don’t remember if it was the same day or it was later. No, it was later. I only heard about it. First they had to arrest them, and then they conducted them along Shevska Street, Schustergasse, and they had a kind of military discipline, they were arranged in rows…His voice trailed off, and then he said, Ah, it was strange.

  In Ukraine, Olga had told us, They marched them two by two up this street to the cemetery. The sound of the shooting went on so long that my mother took down her old sewing machine…

  And Lonek Ellenbogen, he tried to escape, he tried to climb the wall of the cemetery—the wall doesn’t exist anymore—and he was shot. And someone told Shlomo how it happened.

  He finished, and Matt, articulating my own unspoken thought, said, But if you were Jewish police, perhaps—even naively—you thought, If I am Jewish police I will get better treatment?

  It’s complicated, Josef said again. Anyway, after so many years, after all Meg is not responsible.

  I thought of Meg, her pride, her riveting acuity, the oscillation between tenderness and steeliness, and for a moment I could have wept. She had surely always known of the stories that we were hearing today for the first time, and just as surely, I now saw, she was terrified we’d find out. Terrified that we’d judge her brother, a boy in his—what? twenties? late teens?—who’d buckled under pressures that no American or Australian kid of nineteen or twenty-two today could even begin to conceive of. He had swaggered, had thought he was doing something important when he refused to let an old friend escape. She had been terrified that we’d judge him. No, I thought: Terrified that we’d judge her. I shook my head and said to Josef, No, no. I’m just trying to understand psychologically—Meg remembered many things, but anything about her in the war—nothing! How she survived, what her story was: nothing. It’s like a black hole.

  Ilana, who had remained silent throughout her husband’s narrative, and through my response, spoke softly from her seat. She said, And I think time has nothing to do with it, because we don’t forget.

  I looked across the table. There was something about this dark and thoughtful woman that I found very appealing: the opinions she expressed seemed to me complicated in just the right degree, a fine balance of unsentimental rigor and a softening humanity. As if to confirm my silent appraisal, at that moment Ilana Adler said, rather heatedly, extending an arm as if to embrace the whole of our conversation that evening, What is memory? What is memory? Memory is what you remember. No, you change the story, you “remember.” A story, not a fact. Where are the facts? There is the memory, there is the truth—you don’t know, never.

  Soon it was time for us to leave for the train station. Matt, as usual, was worrying about the fading daylight, and so we finished our coffees and went outside, where he took some pictures of Josef standing by the parking sign, whose Hebrew warning, I thought to myself with a smile, certainly “said Israel.” Then we got into Josef’s car. As we pulled up at the intersection of two streets called Freud and Wallenberg, Josef turned to me and said, apropos of nothing we’d been talking about, a sentence that could have been an explanation, a justification, I’m not really sure, It isn’t enough to be nice to people. In Bolechow we were nice to people, and it didn’t do us any good.

  INTENSIFIED AND DARKENED, now, by unpleasant revelations, the gloom clung still when we went to our final destination the next day, the cool and darkened apartment of Anna Heller Stern: another exhausted and melancholy return to a place I’d already been.

  Once again, she had prepared an elaborate tray of cakes and cookies; once again, she hovered, making sure we had enough Coke, enough iced tea. Once again, she told us what she remembered about Shmiel and Ester and the girls. Once again, she related what she’d heard about Frydka and Ciszko. This time, however, since both Dyzia and Klara had offered recollections of Ciszko as well as of Frydka, we prompted Anna to try to remember what the Polish boy had been like.

  Yes, she said, of course she remembered him. He was heavy, not too high, and blond. Blaue augen.

  Solidly built, I guessed was what she meant; medium height, and blue eyes. That much, all three women agreed on.

  He was hiding somewhere, she added, unprompted, but probably not in his own house: his mother would have killed him! she said. He was bringing her food, she said. And then somebody denounced them. This is what she’d heard, at least.

  So she told us everything once again. She shared, too, her own remarkable story of hiding, a hiding that was, unlike Frydka’s, successful. Once again she showed the picture of the Polish priest who had saved her life by making false papers for her. Once again she showed us the false baptismal certificate, the one that had given her the name Anna, which she’d kept ever since. Matt took a picture of the document. ANNA KUCHARUK, it said.

  I noticed that the date of birth given on the certificate had just passed, and smiling I said I was sorry to have missed the big day, if that was indeed her real birthday. Anna said yes, that was her real birthday, in fact; she’d just turned eighty-three. Happy Birthday! we all said.

  Matt wanted to know what she planned to do with all these documents. Would they go to Yad Vashem? he asked.

  Anna talked to Shlomo, who said to us, Yes, everything.

  Then, becoming animated in that outsized way that he has, Shlomo started speaking heatedly to us, gesturing with both hands and biting into the English words. I myself gave all to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, I have almost no originals, he said. You know, I think…I think, what was the reason for my survival. What was it? Why people elder than I, smarter than I, more educated than I didn’t survive, but I survived?

  Surwived.

  Shlomo took a breath and then said, more slowly: I think it is two reasons: one, that I take my revenge. And the second is to tell, to tell whoever wants to hear the story of what happened.

  We nodded. He went on.

  For years, he said, I believed that this life was not real life—that I would look up and there would be my family. I didn’t want to bring children into this world. When I was married I did not want to have children! The main change started, I think, after the trek I made in ’ninety-six to Bolechow, with Jack and Bob and the rest. When I saw, when I saw that nothing, nothing is left, not our houses, nothing was left of our factories, nothing was left even of the garden with the pool…OK, I thought, this is it: I cannot return. The past cannot return. I had to admit it. So I started writing.

  Matt and I nodded, and I said I certainly understood. Shlomo turned to Anna and translated all of what he’d told us into Yiddish, and she said something briefly.

  Shlomo looked at us. She said that her husband used to say that whoever came through the Holocaust and says that he is completely normal, he’s lying. It’s not true.

  Anna spoke again briefly in Yiddish.

  She says for years she’s under treatment for psychiatrist, Shlomo said. Her children know that they grow up in a home which is not a happy home. You know, in a sad home, the parents cannot be happy, because they have this background. And they understood.

  I looked at Anna and tried to show how sympathetic we were to her. I was struck again by the fact that all of the people I’d talked to last time and who had shared with me, then, so many stories, so many facts, were now suddenly offering, for the first time, these acknowledgments of their struggle
s with mental anguish, with fear and panic and anxiety.

  I said, Well I’m sure, of course. Not a happy home.

  Mrs. Begley’s son once said of his mother, Something in her had been broken, and when he said this I had thought, The ones who were killed were not the only ones who’d been lost.

  Anna spoke a third time, slowly enough so that this time I didn’t need Shlomo to translate. Will fargessen, zol nisht fargessen, kann nisht fargessen.

  You want to forget, but you shouldn’t forget, you cannot forget.

  I nodded and explained to her that this was exactly why we were doing this project, going all over the world and finding the remaining Bolechowers so that we could glean from them every scrap, every nugget of information about my family.

  She asked us where else we had been. I told her I’d been many places, and not only places where there were Bolechowers, but other places too, places that would help me get a feel for what had happened. Not only Australia but Vienna and Prague; not only Tel Aviv but Latvia, where I met the one remaining Jew in a small town outside of Riga, a man named, as it happened, Mendelsohn—although because the Mendelsohns in my family had never talked, because there were so few stories, so few concrete details about my father’s family, those Mendelsohns who came in 1892 from Riga, I had no way of knowing whether I was related to this Jew of Riga named Mendelsohn. (This Mendelsohn was a craggy white-haired man who, although he was nearly ninety, towered over me, and who went into his bedroom, after we asked him how he dealt with whatever anti-Semitism might be left there, now that there was only one Jew left to hate, and came back brandishing a shotgun.) Not only Beer Sheva but Lithuania, where the death pits in the Ponar forest, where the Jews of Vilna once picnicked, hold a hundred thousand of those same Jews, lying now under the lawns they’d once sat upon in pleasure. This return to Israel, I told Anna, was our final trip, now that we’d been to Sweden to see Klara Freilich.

  Anna looked at me, and then looked at Shlomo. Klara Freilich, she said, musingly. KLAAhh-ra FREIIII-lich. The way you might say, Ahh-HAAAhhhh.

  Shlomo nodded and said, Yankeles froh. Yankel’s wife.

  Anna said, Yaw. Fun Yankele vill ikh nisht reydn.

  About Yankel I don’t want to speak.

  I looked at her, startled. Farvuss nisht? I said. Why not?

  She looked at me hard. Farvuss? Vayl er geveyn in di yiddisheh Militz.

  I thought I’d heard right, but Shlomo’s translation left no room for doubt.

  Her husband was a Yiddish poliziant, he said, looking at me severely. She said she doesn’t want to speak about him because he was a Jewish policeman. And one Akcja, Aktion, was led by the Jewish police.

  Matt and I stared at each other. I knew we had the same thought: it was like a replay of Haifa. Now, as my mind raced, certain things Klara had said—and certain things she had, I now realized, not said—started to come back to me. For instance, that they had left for their hiding place unusually late, much later than everyone else. For instance, that all throughout her narrative, that last day, of the war years, she’d never actually talked about her late husband, had merely let it be assumed that whatever was happening to her had been happening to him, too. The dreadful anxiety in the work camp, the tense waiting for the night of departure. Fumbling, I said, So when the Jewish police were part of these actions, they were just as—doing everything that…?

  Shlomo said, with startling loud emphasis, They came, they took you away, if you had any money you gave them money, they led you away. They believed that everybody else will be killed, but they will be left.

  I thought of what Marek had said about his father, how generous and good he had been. I remembered what Josef Adler had said the night before: some were bad, and some were good. It was complicated. At that moment, I chose to believe that Yankel Freilich had been one of the good ones. With this in mind, I turned to Shlomo. Let me ask you this, I said. How did you become a Jewish police? I mean, could you say no?

  Shlomo shot me a reproachful, mirthless half-smile. You couldn’t say no, no. Some of them volunteered, and some of them were forced. But who was “forced”?

  I said, Who knows? But I’m saying that—

  (What I wanted to say was this: that if I thought I could save my new wife, and myself, by being in the Jewish police, by enjoying whatever tawdry perquisites they received in return for being the ones who rounded up their fellow Jews, would I do it? Yes, I might.)

  Shlomo interrupted me. But we had two leaders of Judenrat, they hanged themselves, in Bolechow.

  I nodded. I know, I said. Reifeisen—

  Reifeisen and Schindler, Shlomo said.

  His point, I could see, was that there were some whose moral repugnance at what they were being forced to do had led them to make other choices. But who was I to judge? Anyway, Yankel was long in his grave, his generosity to his fellow Jews after the war, at any rate, a matter of record. Right now I felt protective of Klara, who, I had by now come to know, had once been forced to endure an unimaginable horror, and whose almost girlish flirtatiousness, her porcelain ballerinas and bucolic paintings and poignant dressing up and taste for fancy clothes and nice jewelry, I now thought, were perhaps a kind of superficial recompense, a flimsy reparation, for the things that still haunted her. So I chose to believe that her Yankel had been one of the good Jewish policemen.

  Anna said something to Shlomo, who after a moment turned to me and translated. She says, He can be ashamed how they behaved, the treatment.

  Then Shlomo said, I have for you a story, a private story, but this cannot be in your book, you have to turn off the tape recorder.

  I turned off the tape recorder. He started talking.

  IT WAS NOT long afterward, just as we were about to leave Anna’s apartment, that a certain memory came suddenly to Shlomo and changed everything.

  We’d been talking about Dusia Zimmerman, the girl whose brother, at least according to Meg Grossbard, had been Lorka’s boyfriend during the Occupation…although now that we’d heard about Mr. Halpern, now that we’d heard Lorka had been easier than the others remembered, who knew? Yulek Zimmerman had perished, Shlomo was saying, but his sister had survived. He told me a remarkable story. After the war, she had married a Belgian to whom she had not revealed she was Jewish until many years after their marriage. But it was well known that she refused to talk to anyone, clung to her privacy tenaciously.

  Well, I joked, at least we wouldn’t have to go to Belgium. It was enough that we’d just been to Sweden, had made this crazy trip from New York to London and London to Stockholm and Stockholm back to London and then London to Tel Aviv!

  And, I thought, it was enough that we followed Dyzia Lew on a wild-goose chase to Israel.

  At that moment Shlomo literally slapped his hand to his forehead. Ooooh!!! he exclaimed, Oh!!! I forgot!!! You were in Scandinavia! In Copenhagen lives a man from Bolechow. Oy oy oy oy oy!

  I said, Who? Maybe, I thought, he’s not important.

  But Shlomo, recovering himself, just said, You know what? We will talk. We will phone him later from my place.

  After this photo session with Anna, we were supposed to go to Shlomo’s for a festive lunch prepared by his wife, Ester, a solid, round-faced woman who spoke little English but whose warmth and generosity, despite the language barrier, permeated her few words of English the way that the smells of the delicious foods she roasted and fried and baked each time I visited filled her small kitchen. It was Ester who had said to me, inclining her head toward her husband as the three of us sat down to the gigantic lunch she’d prepared for my first visit to Israel, Bolechow, Bolechow, Bolechow! and made a face of affectionate exasperation as she ladled out kneydlakh.

  Now, in Anna Stern’s living room, I said again, Who is it? Who lives in Copenhagen?

  Shlomo excitedly talked to Anna in Yiddish for a while. I heard Malcia Lewenwirths onkel. I heard, Akegn der D.K. D.K. Pronounced day-kah. The Dom Katolicki. Across from the D.K.

  Der haus ake
gn di D.K. The house across from the D.K.

  I listened, getting impatient. So who is this man in Copenhagen, Shlomo?

  He told me that there was another Bolechower whom he had completely forgotten to tell me about, a much older man named Adam Kulberg, who’d lived in the neighborhood of the Dom Katolicki. It hadn’t occurred to him to mention this man to me before, he said, because Kulberg had gone east into the Soviet Union just before the Germans arrived. For this reason, he wouldn’t be able to tell us anything about what had happened to the Jägers. He hadn’t been there. He wouldn’t know.

  I thought, Nobody else was really “there,” either, nobody else had actually seen what happened to them; but they all had stories. I thought, We were in Sweden, for God’s sake: it would have been so easy to stop in Denmark on this trip. But I looked at Shlomo and saw how mortified he was, and thought, Who am I to complain about inconvenience, to these people? So what I said was, Well maybe we should call him from your place, we’ll find out if he knows anything, maybe it’s not even worth schlepping there.

  Shlomo looked relieved. I will phone him, he said. In five, ten minutes you will ask him your questions.

  I said, How old is he? Maybe his memory was gone, I thought, wildly. It could well be that there was no point in being upset in the first place.

  Shlomo said, Oh, elder than she. He nodded in Anna’s direction—she was sitting on the sofa, posing for Matt—and then he said, Oh, how did I forget, how I forgot?!