The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  We came to interview Adam on Friday afternoon, a few hours after we flew in. Alena Marchwinski opened the door. An attractive, intense-looking woman in her early fifties, she was wearing her dark hair pulled severely back, and had dressed casually but elegantly in a black open-necked sweater and black slacks. She introduced us to her family, who had crowded into the entrance hall of the apartment to meet us: her husband, Władyslaw, who goes by Władek and who is a concert violinist; their daughter, Alma, a girl of perhaps twelve with a dreamy face and a soft smile; and her parents. I looked at Adam Kulberg, this man who might be my relative. He had the face of a Mayan king: rectangular, a craggy nose, the kind of face that is suited for sculpture. His eyes, though, were gentle as he looked back at me, smiling. He had a full head of snow-white hair that was brushed, like his daughter’s, straight back from his high forehead to reveal the strong features. For this special occasion he had donned a dark gray suit over a lighter gray sweater that had slender vertical white stripes; this formality, together with the slicked-back hair and the fact that the points of his open white collar rested neatly above the collar of his sweater, gave this eighty-three-year-old man a curiously fashionable aura.

  Our plan was to conduct an interview first and then have our meal. In her spacious living room Alena had set up a small glass-and-steel table in front of the divan where I sat down. On the table she’d placed an assortment of drinks: Evian, sparking water, fruit juices in small bottles. An entire wall to my left was filled with carefully organized books of the sort that scholars accumulate: multivolume sets of reference works, thick tomes. Catty-corner to it was a wall of large windows. On the sill of the window nearest to us a simple vase held a profusion of flowers. Below another of these windows, slightly off to the right of the group, Adam’s wife, Zofia, a very pretty woman with soft white hair, the short cut of which revealed large pearl earrings, was sitting on a small, tufted, Edwardian-looking leather sofa. She was wearing a dark skirted suit with a white blouse and satin jabot at her throat. That night, and then the next day, she smiled often and lovingly as Adam spoke. She had a wide, beatific smile, which it was clear her granddaughter had inherited, and she used it often.

  Alena and her father sat down next to each other and directly across from me as I checked my recording equipment, she lounging comfortably in a dark-stained wicker armchair, he sitting erect in one of the dining table chairs that had been brought in for him. Behind them, through a large window, the weak but plentiful afternoon light streamed in. To my right sat Alena’s husband, a tall, handsome, reserved man who looked Nordic despite the fact that he, like his wife and in-laws, was born in Poland and had, like his in-laws, like the Freilichs, like Ewa, like many Jews who had stayed in Poland after the war was over, left for Scandinavia in the late Sixties. Władek listened quietly as his wife and father-in-law talked, intervening only to translate for Adam whenever Alena left the sitting room to check on dinner. Throughout our long visit, Alena often smoked, with an un-American lack of apology or self-consciousness. Now, after everyone had settled into chairs and sofas, she lighted a cigarette and we began to chat.

  For a few minutes we discussed the progress of the war, which was a sensitive subject just then if you were an American traveling in Europe, where the war was not popular—although, to be sure, the subject was not as sensitive as it would become eight weeks later, after the revelations about prisoner abuse by American soldiers, a subject I would have liked to be able to discuss with Adam Kulberg and the others, in fact. The reason I would have liked to bring this subject up was this: among the abuses said to have taken place was a certain bizarre humiliation that took the form of forcing the naked prisoners to climb on top of each other in order to form a living pyramid. When I first read about this in the papers, two months after I returned from Copenhagen, I was struck forcefully by this detail, since I remembered of course the detail, one of the first we ever learned about the Nazi torture of Bolechow’s Jews, that Olga in Bolechow had told us about, that August day in 2001: how, during the first Aktion, the Germans and Ukrainians had forced naked Jews in the Dom Katolicki to climb on top of one another, forming a human pyramid with the rabbi at the top. What was it, I wondered when I read about Abu Ghraib, what was this impulse to degrade that took the specific form of building pyramids with human flesh? But after a while it occurred to me that this particular type of degradation was a perfect if perverted symbol of the abandonment of civilized values; since after all the impulse to pile one thing atop another, the impulse to build, the impulse—spread across continents and civilizations—to build pyramids, whether in Egypt or Peru, can be seen as the earliest expression of the mysterious human instinct to create, to make something out of nothing, to be civilized. I, who had once spent so much time reading about the Egyptians, sat and read the newspaper on an April morning in 2004 and looked at the fuzzy photograph of the ungainly naked human pyramid, which for all we know was how certain Jews in the Dom Katolicki looked on October 28, 1941, and thought, There it all was, contained in this small triangle: the best of human instincts and the worst, the heights of civilization and the depths of bestiality, the making of something out of nothing and the making of nothing out of something. Pyramids of stone, pyramids of flesh.

  But that came later. Now, at Alena’s flat, we turned our attention to another war, to the past.

  First, we found out we were cousins.

  Since the day of the phone conversation in Israel that had brought us here, I’d been eager to figure out what the relationship could have been between our families: after returning from our last trip, I’d thoroughly searched through all my genealogical records and could still find no connection between the Jägers of Bolechow and the Friedlers from Rozniatów, Adam’s mother’s family. I asked if his father’s family had been Bolechowers for a long time, and after Alena translated the question, Adam waved a hand behind his left shoulder, beckoning backward. She didn’t need to translate that: Yes, a long time. He said he’d known the Jägers from his earliest childhood, and counted out on his thumb, forefinger, and middle finger the names of the Jägers he knew of: Shmiel. Itzhak. Someone called Y’chiel, perhaps one of the cousins. He knew the wife, Ester, he said: she was beautiful, good-looking. He smiled.

  I asked how many girls he thought there were.

  Alena talked to her father for a minute and then said, He knew that there were four, but he only knew personally two: and the name of the ones he knew was Lorka—he thinks she was the oldest—and Frydka. They were both good-looking, but they were different. One was light, blond, and the other was dark.

  Matt, who was holding the video camera, looked over and shot me a huge smile, which I returned. Adam Kulberg was the first person we’d talked to who knew how many girls there had been. Irrationally, perhaps, this gave him a kind of instant authority in my eyes. It was our last trip. I wanted to believe every word he said.

  He said something to Alena, who said to me, He said that he always knew that his family were connected, like a family relation, with the Jägers. He always knew that it was a connection, but he never knew what kind of connection.

  I had an idea. What was his father’s business? I asked. They spoke for a minute or two and Alena said, He had a butcher shop, and over a period of time he eventually had three butcher shops. They were in the center of the town, but one of the shops was not a kosher shop, and this shop was in front of the salt mine, the salina. The other shop was just beside the house, and the street address was Szewczenki 23, and it was just opposite the Dom Katolicki.

  Akegn di DK, across from the DK, Anna Heller Stern and Shlomo had said, that day in her apartment when Shlomo had smacked his hand against his forehead and said, How did I forget? How I forgot?

  I said, Well, that’s the connection. You know, the Jägers were also butchers.

  They talked. Alena took a drag on her cigarette, exhaled, and said, He knows where was the butcher shop of Shmiel, next to the Magistrat. Five meters from the Magistrat, he said.<
br />
  I nodded. In my mind’s eye I saw a piece of stationery from the PARKER-JAEGER COMPANY, which had been carefully tucked long ago into a book with a faded blue cloth binding. 67—Bottom. Our store, Left.

  Beside the Magistrat, Alena repeated, Shmiel had the butcher shop. During the 1930s, she went on, translating her father’s memories, Shmiel had bought a truck and had started shipping his meat to Lwów, to other Jewish butchers. He had a reputation for being very good in business. He was very clever, very clever in business. And—she listened while her father added something—he was rather well known in the city, in the town.

  I smiled but didn’t interrupt.

  Adam now explained that his uncle, his father’s brother, had been Shmiel’s driver. His name was Wolf Kulberg. Alena said, And not only did he work for Shmiel but they were living there, in Shmiel’s house!

  He lived in Shmiel’s house?

  Adam gestured with his hands, sketching a floor plan. Alena said, To the house of Shmiel they built an extension. So he was living, the brother of his father was living in the extension. And he brought his wife from Lwów, and he rented this room from Shmiel, and lived there with his wife and daughter.

  It seemed clear to me at this point that this was the family connection between the Jägers and the Kulbergs that Adam had remembered from his childhood; this would explain why he’d spent time around Shmiel’s house, as a boy, and had consequently known them so well: Shmiel the big fish in the small pond, pretty Ester, the daughters—not two, not three, but four—of whom he remembered Lorka and Frydka so clearly. The one fair, the other dark.

  Adam seemed to be reading my thoughts, and said something to Alena. She said, But if we’re connected to the Jägers, he says it’s not this, it’s because they are family, the Jägers and the Kulbergs.

  Her father corrected her and she listened for a moment and then said, No, not Kulbergs—Kornblühs.

  Adam looked at me and said, Kornblüh!

  Kornblühs! I repeated excitedly. We’re related to them!

  No! Alena said, incredulous. He also! His grandmother was a Kornblüh. Ryfka Kornblüh was the mother of his father.

  I said, Well that’s how we’re related. My grandfather’s grandmother was a Kornblüh. Neche Kornblüh. She came from a family of butchers, too.

  Adam and Zofia watched this exchange, smiling tentatively. Now Alena translated it for her parents, and as she spoke they beamed. Adam talked for a while to his daughter, who nodded occasionally and then told me a story. Ryfka Kornblüh, she said, she lived…well, there was the Magistrat and then the Russian church, and just in the neighborhood of the Russian church she was living. He talks about her very often. They had a place in the market, with vegetables. And she had sixteen—no, seventeen grandchildren! So the grandchildren, when they met, would always make jokes that when they visited her they got the spoiled vegetables—the leftovers. Not that it was true! She died before the war, but her husband died very young. My father is named after him, his name was Abraham Kulberg.

  Adam said something. Alena said, But he says that his grandfather when he was born was registered as an illegitimate child, with the mother’s, not the father’s, name—Abraham Kornblüh, not Abraham Kulberg.

  Of course I thought, at that moment, of another document I was familiar with from long ago: the 1847 birth certificate of my grandfather’s uncle Ire Jäger. Der Zuname der unehel. Kindes Mutter ist Kornblüh. The surname of the illegitimate child’s mother is Kornblüh. I asked Alena to tell her father that, by a curious coincidence, in our family, too, there had been this business with “illegitimate” children; and in our case, too, the mother had been a Kornblüh.

  So we are related! Alena said, smiling.

  I looked at her, at her father, the room, the book-lined walls, not so different from my own apartment. I thought, If you were making this up, it would seem too pat: the man we nearly missed hearing about, the trip we nearly didn’t make, the instant sense of connection that we had felt with this family, a university professor and a musician, a family with whom my own family in the States, a family of writers and journalists and filmmakers, of pianists and harpsichordists and, long ago, of violinmakers, had so much in common. And then the discovery, also almost accidental, that this family were our family.

  I looked at Alena and her father.

  We’re cousins! I replied.

  ON THAT SAME night, after we’d moved from the sitting room to the dining-room table, on which the roast duck that Alena had prepared was now waiting, Adam told us what he knew about Frydka and Ciszko.

  He said he knew the Szymanskis very well, that they’d lived in the same neighborhood as the Jägers. Alena paused, and Adam then related an anecdote I’d heard before: that the Szymanskis, who had always been known for having friendly relations with the town’s Jews, were known for the excellent Polish sausage they made. Now, as Adam put it, To eat not kosher, or ham, it was a terrible thing!—

  (Oh, yes, I thought, we knew)

  —a terrible thing. But in the Szymanski shop there was a special room where the Jews would come and, in secret, try a piece of bread with ham.

  Adam laughed as he told the story, and Matt said, A secret place!

  Szymanskis, a secret place. I asked, What did Ciszko look like?

  Adam said that Ciszko had been very big, quite strong. Not tall, but not small either. He had a very good relationship with the Jewish kids in town, Adam said. He didn’t wonder that it was Ciszko who’d tried to save Frydka.

  I asked Alena to ask her father exactly which story he’d heard. Then I said, No, ask him first how he heard it.

  Immediately after the war, Adam said, at the very beginning, everybody was hungry for information. So people searched for information, for stories. He said that somebody from Bolechow had made an appointment for the Bolechowers to meet in Katowice after the war, at the beginning of 1946.

  It was there, Adam said, that everybody was talking about what had happened to the people they’d known, swapping the stories they’d heard, and this is when he’d first heard the story about Frydka and Shmiel and Ciszko. With an apologetic smile, he added that he didn’t remember who he’d heard it from.

  But Meg Grossbard had been at that meeting, he added.

  I said to Alena, Tell him that Meg isn’t telling the story.

  Alena gave me a puzzled look and said, She doesn’t remember?

  I explained to her about Meg, how in Australia she’d refused to talk about it.

  I told her something that had happened more recently, only last month, two weeks after I’d returned from Israel…

  THE PHONE HAD rung late one evening in my apartment in New York: it was Meg. The connection wasn’t terribly good, but even so I could hear the tightness in her voice.

  I have to come to Frydka’s defense, she announced after we’d said hello. She went on, There is nobody to defend her now.

  I immediately saw what was going on. Somehow she’d found out that I’d heard the story that Frydka was pregnant.

  They’re only stories, Meg said. They can’t be proved. Just write the facts.

  I told her that I, too, was interested in facts, of course, that we had started out on this long series of journeys because we wanted to find the facts. But I said that because of what we’d heard on our trips, I’d also become extremely interested in stories, in the way that the stories multiplied and gave birth to other stories, and that even if these stories weren’t true, they were interesting because of what they revealed about the people who told them. What they revealed about the people who told them, I said, was also part of the facts, the historical record.

  I said, Some stories aren’t the whole story.

  Meg said, And what is behind these stories? I can tell you lots of stories of what is behind these stories. There are personal grudges. If someone didn’t like your family, they told a story.

  It was as if she were reading my thoughts, which at that moment had nothing to do with the information tha
t she claimed to find so scandalous: that Frydka had been pregnant with Ciszko’s child. But of course I didn’t say anything.

  She said, And how did they know she was pregnant? Who saw her? Who saw her? If somebody knew about it, she knew it, and Ciszko knew it, and that would be all.

  In Anna Heller Stern’s apartment, Shlomo had told me a story about a man he’d known from another town who’d been a member of the Jewish police in that town. He did not behave nicely (Shlomo had said) but had started his life over, had joined the Polish army. Apparently during the time this former Jewish policeman was in hiding, after he’d run away from the Jewish police, run away from this town to save himself, he’d written down an account of everything he’d seen.

  He wrote them when he was hiding in a cellar, Shlomo had said. Very, very strong words! Very. It says only things that he saw, things that they saw that nobody else saw, nobody was able to see. He described some things that were horrible.

  I thought of this and wanted to say to Meg that a Jewish policeman could have seen that Frydka was pregnant, on the day she was dragged from her hiding place in the house of the art teacher, Mrs. Szedlak (or, as Adam also referred to her, Szedlakowa); but of course I couldn’t, now, bring up the subject of Jewish police. So I said nothing.

  Meg said, If people talk, it’s just orally. But when you see the written word, it’s different.

  I said, I know.

  …SO MEG WASN’T going to share the story, I now told Alena with a wry smile, as we sat in her dining room in Copenhagen.

  Matt said, But what was the story he heard?

  Adam and Alena talked for a while. She said, He heard that Ciszko tried to help her. And the idea was that Frydka and her papa should hide by Szedlakowa.

  “Her papa” had a strong effect on me, for some reason, and for a moment I couldn’t say anything. It’s all he’d been, in the end, all and everything: somebody’s papa, a dad. I thought this, and then I registered her use of the word by. “By Szedlakowa.” Zey zent behalten bay a lererin.