The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  Alena said, She was a teacher. Then she said, disconcertingly, I’m so sorry, it’s a cliché!—

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  It’s a cliché, but I have to go check the oven! I grinned with relief and Alena got out of her chair and darted off to check on the dessert. While she was gone, her mother spoke up, and in halting but forceful English finished translating what Adam had said.

  And they was together, Frydka with Ciszko, by the teacher Szedlakowa. Somebody say this to the Germans, and Germany killed both Frydka and Ciszko. He hear, but if the story is true or not he cannot say.

  Germany, she had said, although I knew she meant Germans. Well, I thought: either way.

  She was hiding in the house of this teacher?

  Yes, in the house, Zofia said.

  I nodded and said, So the story is that this woman had Frydka in her house, and also Ciszko?

  Alena took her seat again and said, Yes. No. He said Ciszko was only visiting Frydka, and bringing her things, food, whatever, but he was not staying there, he hid her there. What happened to that Szedlakowa, my father does not know. He only knows that they killed her and Ciszko.

  Alena passed me a platter and, leaning toward me, said, It’s a heroic story!

  As we all started eating dessert, she turned to me and said, But how will you tell it? Before I had a chance to answer, she told me about some friends she had in New York, people her age, whose family had stories—terrible stories, she said—about the war. Now these people had a child, Alena went on, a daughter in her early twenties, who’d just taken her degree in literature, and who had written her thesis about her grandmother, the one who’d suffered those terrible things. Alena said that this young woman had given her the thesis to read, and while reading it she had been struck by something.

  She said, It was like what she was interested in was not so much the story of her grandmother but how to tell the story of her grandmother—how to be the storyteller.

  I thought of my grandfather and said that, yes, it was a very interesting problem.

  She described how caught up in the thesis she’d become, against her initial expectations. With great animation she said, I felt that when I was reading it, like in the end, it got closer and closer to the important things, the things about the war. At first it was as if she was telling a common story, a story everybody could tell, but it got narrower and narrower.

  After a moment I said yes, that’s how my grandfather used to tell stories. The long windup, all that background, all those Chinese boxes; and then, suddenly, the swift and expert slide into the finale, the finish line where the connections between all the details you’d learned along the way, the seemingly irrelevant facts and subsidiary anecdotes he’d lingered over at the beginning, suddenly became clear.

  I said to Alena, I know, I know. This girl she knows, I thought, must be very clever. So many people know these horrible stories by now, after all; what more was there to say? How to tell them? One way, I supposed, was to get narrower and narrower toward the end, the way my grandfather did.

  At that moment Alena said, Narrower, yes. It’s always the small things. It makes it like life. The most interesting thing is always the details.

  I said to Alena, It’s a very tricky, a tricky problem. But, I went on, the story we learned on this trip was a far more dramatic story than anything we could have dreamed of, when we first started looking for information. It’s a story that would, as we say in English, tell itself.

  To myself I thought that this was a bit of a lie: here we were at the end of all our travels, and still I had no definitive story to tell. The finale was still lacking, the one thing that would lock it into place, account for all the discrepant versions: Ciszko hid her, a schoolteacher hid her, she was pregnant, she was pregnant by someone but not by Ciszko. I know nussink, I see nussink. But even as I thought this I also thought, For whose benefit, exactly, is the wholeness that I want so desperately? The dead need no stories: that is the fantasy of the living, who unlike the dead feel guilt. Even if they did need stories, surely my dead, Shmiel and Ester and the girls, had much more of a story now, and far, far more details, than anyone could have dreamed of even two years ago; surely that counted for something, if as some people think the dead need to be appeased. But of course I don’t believe this: the dead lie in their graves, in the cemeteries or the forests or roadside ditches, and all this is of no interest to them, since they have, now, no interests of any kind at all. It is we, the living, who need the details, the stories, because what the dead no longer care about, mere fragments, a picture that will never be whole, will drive the living mad. Literally mad. My grandfather had a nervous breakdown in middle age, not too long after that day in 1946 when my mother came home from school and found him sobbing with his head in his arms at the kitchen table of their apartment in the Bronx, a letter like none other he had received from Bolechow in all those years of writing back and forth to Shmiel—a correspondence of which we have, after all, only one half, and of which the other half could have consisted of letters saying Dear Brother, We have tried everything but cannot come up with the money, but we will not give up, or then again Why don’t you ask Ester’s brothers first?: an incompleteness that, while I would never claim that it’s driven me mad, has kept me up on certain nights. My grandfather had a nervous breakdown when he was not much older than I am now, and I’m not so sure anymore that it was about business pressures, as I have heard, just as I am no longer completely certain that when he killed himself, that Friday the thirteenth in Miami Beach, it was only a cancer that was eating away at him.

  I thought all this but what I said was, yes, a heroic story! We never could have imagined where it would take us! (I meant geographically, and implied emotionally. But I also thought, morally, since I’d now seen how these facts and stories could force you, almost against your will, to judge people.) For instance, I said to Alena, we were now trying to find relatives of Ciszko Szymanski, although as she well knew, Szymanski was a common name in Poland. Laughing, I told them how, leafing through the program of a ballet performance I’d attended a few months earlier, I’d noticed that one of the dancers was named Szymanska, and that she came from Wrocław, where we knew Ciszko’s mother had gone after the war; and how I’d raced backstage and accosted this slender blond girl, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and started spilling the entire story of Frydka and Ciszko until I realized I was being ridiculous.

  Everybody chuckled, and Alena said, They were in Wrocław?

  We told her to tell her father the story we’d heard from Malcia Reinharz, about how Ciszko’s mother had bewailed her young son’s foolishness. How stupid he was!

  Matt said, He did a good thing! And his family was upset with him for doing a good thing! I looked at him with a sudden stab of affection. It was the same furious, outraged purity that he’d had in high school.

  And yet, as I remembered Malcia’s anecdote, I remembered Josef Adler saying, It was complicated. I thought of Mrs. Szymanski’s outburst, and then thought of stories we’d just heard in Stockholm, heard in Israel. If it was impossible, grotesque, for us, for me or Matt or anyone of our idle generation, to sit in judgment on the emotions of these Jews whose stories we’d been hearing, maybe it was also impossible to sit in judgment on Mrs. Szymanski, who had cried out How stupid he was! when she recalled how he had died for a Jewish girl.

  Well, I murmured, she lost her child.

  Matt was indignant. But he acted like a human being!

  ONCE AGAIN, WE made ourselves comfortable around Alena’s table. We showed Adam some more photographs. Shmiel and Ester on their wedding day, surrounded by hydrangeas. Shmiel with his fur-collared coat. The three girls in the white lace dresses. Frydka in her scarf; Ruchele with her wavy, Mittelmark hair. Shmiel standing in front of one of his trucks with Ester and her brother Bumek Schneelicht.

  Adam picked up this blurry snapshot, in which Shmiel was already white-haired, looking far more tha
n his forty-five years but smiling and thrusting his hands into his overcoat pockets with a self-confident, proprietary air, and said, To jest Shmiel. This is Shmiel. He turned and said something to his daughter, who said to me, This is Shmiel as he remembers him. He says he would recognize Shmiel Jäger anywhere.

  I like to think, now, that it was because of Matt’s presence that, when I showed this man these particular pictures, I took care to ask him about the feelings they evoked in him.

  I said to Alena, Ask him how does it feel to see these faces that he hasn’t seen in such a long time.

  She translated this into Polish, and Adam took off his glasses carefully and thought for a moment. Then he smiled gently and said, I am thinking, and I am going back to the past. I feel like I am on my way to heaven.

  EVERY BOLECHOWER WE had talked to until that night had survived by not moving: by staying perfectly still for days and weeks and months in attics, in haylofts, in cellars, in secret compartments, in holes dug into the forest floor, and in the strangest, most confining prison of all, the fragile prison of a false identity. The last story of survival we were to hear was, like a story you might hear in an epic poem, a Greek myth, a story of perpetual movement, of ceaseless wandering.

  On the day of his twentieth birthday, Adam Kulberg left Bolechow. He told us that night that he’d always had what he thought of as an “instinct for information,” and his instinct, after the Germans started surging through eastern Poland on the twentieth of June, was to leave his hometown and travel east into the Soviet Union with the retreating Russians. He had no job that summer; he was young, he was restless. There had been stories from towns farther away, stories of Jews being shot in cemeteries. Few people believed the stories, but still, he told us, he had his instinct. He tried to persuade his parents that the whole family should leave—his mother and father, himself, his three sisters Chana, Perla, and Sala, girls who were roughly the age of Shmiel’s daughters Frydka, Ruchele, and Bronia. But his father, who hated the Russians, resisted. As his son argued with him, Salamon Kulberg said No. He gave Adam his blessing, but refused to budge. We are born here, the father said. Here is our house, and here we will stay.

  How can you leave a home? Malcia Reinharz had exclaimed in Beer Sheva.

  On his twentieth birthday, Adam said good-bye to his family, kissing each of them in turn as they lined up in the kitchen. As he turned to leave, he impetuously grabbed three photographs. He has them still. In one of them, his youngest sister, Sala, is wearing a watch that, as he realized on his millionth scrutiny of this rare relic of what his life had been, although he had coveted it for a long time and bought it with money he’d painstakingly saved, he had nonetheless let his sister wear.

  So maybe I am a good brother after all! he said to Matt and me with a little smile, when he told us about this picture. He produced the photograph in question, so worn by now that the lost girl’s features are all but unimaginable to anyone but Adam himself.

  Adam left his father’s house—which he would see again just after the war, a little bit older and transformed by his remarkable travels, although the house itself when he saw it again was, he later said to me, utterly unchanged; it was as if somebody had been cooking a meal, had been interrupted, and was planning to come back in a few minutes, which for all we know may well have been the case—he left this house, which would remain almost unchanged even though everything else would change, or at least ninety-nine-point-two percent of everything else, and started walking east. He was accompanied, at first, by two friends who had also had an instinct to leave. One was called Ignacy Taub; the surname, I know, means dove. The other was a boy named Zimmerman, but after a few days on the dusty road to Russia this Zimmerman boy started crying and said he missed his family, and so he turned back and went home. The next, and perhaps last, time that a boy named Zimmerman appears in the narrative of Bolechow is when, in the winter of 1942, Meg Grossbard expressed surprise, during a clandestine visit to the place where her friend Dusia Zimmerman lived, on seeing that Lorka Jäger had taken up with Dusia’s brother Yulek Zimmerman, a boy that Meg would never have guessed might be Lorka’s type. Yulek Zimmerman was killed in a “small” action that took place in 1943.

  So Bumo—as we now must call him, since he was traveling with a friend and all of his friends called him not Adam but Bumo—so Bumo Kulberg and Ignacy Taub started walking. They kept to the smaller roads and every day walked farther east, making sure to keep an eye out for the other traffic: if they saw Russian troops, they knew they were, for the most part, safe. They kept walking and walking, and after a while their course took a southerly turn. They had hit upon a plan: they would walk to Palestine, taking a route through the Caucasus, then south to Iran, and then through Iran, where they would turn westward and penetrate into Palestine.

  Palestine? you might exclaim, as Matt and I did when we heard the beginning of Adam’s tale. Adam smiled self-deprecatingly. We were young, he said.

  After three months, sometimes hitching rides, sometimes jumping on trains, Bumo and Ignacy reached the Caucasus, where they paused and worked for a while at a tobacco farm. It was very hard work, but they were strong and young and, he had to admit, the weather was wonderful. The trees were heavy with fruit, they didn’t go hungry. At the collective farm they had a room with two beds. Everything was spotless. The walls were immaculate, whitewashed. They were even paid a little bit. The place was beautiful, remote. A place where they had many horses, Adam remembered as he spoke. Famous for Cossacks.

  They were in Groznyy. In three months, Bumo and Ignacy had walked from Poland to Chechnya. Although it seemed incredible that there was a war going on—the beautiful weather, the fruit, the clean beds and hard, decent work—Bumo’s pillow was wet with tears every night. He missed his family, and he realized, now, that he was very far from home. At night, he would take out his three photographs and talk to them.

  SOON THEY HEARD that the Germans were coming, and after talking it over the two youths decided that since they hadn’t stayed at home in Bolechow to wait for the Germans to come, they weren’t going to stay in Groznyy, either, however improbably idyllic it was. The local people and their fellow workers on the collective were sad to see them go: they were good workers, and everyone else was in the army. But the boys were firm. They took their back pay and started walking again. Sometimes they traveled by train. The surroundings were beautiful, Adam recalled. Like a Kurort. A spa. The two young men continued heading east through these breathtakingly lovely spots toward the Caspian Sea.

  It was around the time Bumo and Ignacy were traveling through the tiny Soviet Socialist Republic of Daghestan that Ruchele Jäger was made to stand naked on a plank that had been laid over a hastily dug ditch in a place called Taniawa.

  In Makhachkala, the big port city of Daghestan that lies on the western shore of the vast Caspian Sea, Bumo and Ignacy found thousands of war refugees. It was very difficult to get food; nobody had any money. Despite these conditions, Adam and Ignacy, with little more than the clothes on their backs, and, of course, the three precious photographs, gaped at the exotic locals, whose everyday wear included enormous swords.

  Sabers! Big swords! They were allowed to wear them! Bumo exclaimed. Even now, he shook his head in disbelief.

  The city of Makhachkala was, Bumo thought, very beautiful, built like a cascade that dropped gradually into the sea. For three or four weeks they lingered there, waiting for a chance to get on a boat that would take them across the sea; they would continue heading east. The wait seemed endless. Soviet military personnel and their families had priority, thousands of women and children also fleeing east. Bumo and Ignacy spent hours and days loitering around the harbor, waiting to get on a ship. Finally they decided that in the event that only one of them could go, he should do so, and then wait on the other side until his friend joined him. This is what happened. Bumo went first, illegally. It took two days in unbearably crowded conditions to reach the other side, the port city of Krasnovodsk in
Turkmenistan. The temperature was forty-five degrees Celsius—one hundred thirteen degrees Fahrenheit. It was, he said, like the Sahara. Krasnovodsk was known as the city without water, because the water in the Caspian Sea is salt water. Undrinkable. So water was rationed.

  At around the time that Bumo was exploring the brutally hot city without water, Frydka Jäger somehow managed to get herself a place working inside the barrel factory, which wasn’t a bad thing, given how severe the Carpathian winter was.

  In Krasnovodsk, Frydka’s distant cousin Bumo Kulberg got himself a job in the harbor as a longshoreman, hauling things off of ships, and waited for Ignacy Taub to appear.

  After a month, Ignacy came. Although both of them could have had jobs in Krasnovodsk, they kept moving. It was too hot, and there were problems with the water. They knew that the most important thing was to stay healthy. So they decided to go farther, to Ashgabat, on the Turkmeni-Iranian border. They sneaked onto trains and in that manner passed through the terrible Kara-Kum Desert in Central Turkmenistan, a place so barren that the few train stations they saw had not names, but numbers.

  THEY ARRIVED AT Ashgabat in the evening. Here again, even this far, there were refugees everywhere: Ukrainians, White Russians. At the station people asked where they were going, might they be able to be of assistance; but of course Bumo and Ignacy knew that they couldn’t reveal that they wanted to pass through Iran to Palestine. And so they said nothing. Ashgabat was only fourteen kilometers from the Iranian border.

  It was now early in 1942. As the two Bolechow boys hovered tantalizingly close to the land of the Peacock Throne, terrified even to mention where they yearned to go, a nineteen-year-old girl who would grow up to be Meg Grossbard laid eyes on Lorka Jäger for the last time at the home of their mutual friend Dusia Zimmerman, who herself, in time, would come to know something about the wisdom of total discretion.