The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  In Ashgabat, news of the larger world was scarce. Soviet radio was useless propaganda, and listening to the BBC was a dangerous crime. The two boys loitered and eventually found a place to stay. As it happened, the day after they found lodgings they met somebody from Poland who was working in a barbershop. He had some information. Ashgabat, this Polish man said, was closed because of its proximity to the Iranian border; there was no use trying to go any farther. Bumo himself had seen the soldiers regularly patrolling the borders, but still he and Ignacy tried. They started walking from Ashgabat toward Iran. After a few hours, a border patrol stopped them. They were told that they had to turn back; surprisingly, they were treated rather gently. The border soldiers bought tickets for the two Bolechow boys and said to them, You are not allowed to be here.

  So they kept going. Throughout the year of 1942, the boys made their way northeast, cutting through the width of Turkmenistan, through the Kara-Kum Desert and across the Amu Darya River into Uzbekistan. At around the time Bumo Kulberg and Ignacy Taub were crossing the Amu Darya, Ester Jäger and her thirteen-year-old daughter Bronia were being shoved into the cattle car that would take them to Belzec, where they would expire in a gas chamber and where, immediately after their deaths, the mouths, vaginas, and rectums of their corpses would be pried open and searched for valuables before the bodies were thrown in a pit, only to be exhumed months later—at about the time that Bumo and Ignacy were ogling the sights of the legendary Silk Road city of Samarkand—and incinerated, after it was felt that this was a more advisable means of disposal for those two bodies and the six hundred thousand other Jewish bodies that had been buried along with them.

  A few months later Bumo and Ignacy were nearing Tashkent, and it was at about this time that the young woman who was born Chaya Heller but who, because of the courageous goodness of a priest in Lublin, Poland, would one day be called Anna Heller Stern, turned to her school friend Lorka Jäger and said, Come, give me a kiss, who knows when we will see each other again?

  By the beginning of 1943, when the W’s were liquidated in Bolechow, Ester and Bronia’s onetime neighbors were in Tashkent, in the far eastern corner of Uzbekistan. At the time, it was the largest city in Central Asia, a city of two million people. Some time later, around the time the R’s were being liquidated, Bumo, traveling alone, reached Frunze—the present-day Bishkek—the capital of Kyrgyzstan.

  It was very interesting! Adam exclaimed. He grinned modestly, as if to say, Anyone would have done the same. He said, I was twenty-one years old!

  Did he ever think of how amazing all this was while it was happening? I asked.

  Alma talked to her father. No, she said. He says it was his fate.

  Wait, Matt said. Why was Bumo traveling alone in Frunze?

  Because, he explained, he and Ignacy, like all the other travelers and refugees who surged through the cities of Central Asia during the war, were in the habit of stopping in the bazaar of each city and town they passed through, to ask for news of the world and look for the friendly faces of foreigners like themselves. And in one of these bazaars, in one of these places, Ignacy Taub had run into his family from Bolechow.

  This is a true story, Adam said.

  I didn’t doubt that it was. I thought of the man in the elevator in Prague, on the day Froma and I came back from Theresienstadt, who had turned to us and said, out of the blue, Yes, I was in Babi Yar. The woman in Beth Hatefutsoth who had turned out to be Yona. The woman in a flea market in New York City who, one summer day as she was trying to sell me a piece of fabric, cocked her head to one side and suddenly said to me, You lost someone in the Holocaust, didn’t you? I thought of Shlomo, asking me in the car on the way to Beer Sheva, Have you ever heard from a Bolechower, a famous American journalist called Krauthammer? and my saying No, I had only heard from a famous American editor named Wieseltier; and then Yona turning to me and saying her name was Wieseltier. Maybe there were no coincidences, I thought. Or perhaps it was just a statistical issue. Maybe there were so many Jewish ghosts that you were bound, in the end, to run into one.

  After he said good-bye to Ignacy, in this bazaar in Kyrgyzstan, Adam said, he met two people from Bolechow. He didn’t remember in which city he said good-bye to Ignacy, but it was midway through 1943, which is to say when the last of the Jews of Bolechow were being liquidated; and he knew it was at the Chinese border. Another way of putting this is to say that by the time that Bumo Kulberg, a Jewish youth from a small town in Poland, reached China, there were no Jews left in Bolechow, apart from those who were living in cellars and attics and haylofts and holes dug into forest floors. Among these hidden Jews, at least for a little while, were, we think, Shmiel and Frydka Jäger.

  With his two new Bolechower friends—one of whom, I may as well mention, was named Naphtali Krauthammer—Bumo had heard that at some distance from where they then were there was a camp for refugees from Poland, located in a place on the northern border of Uzbekistan called Tokmok. At this point Bumo had decided that he wanted to make contact with Poles, because now, after his original plan to reach Palestine had been thwarted, he was eager to find out where he could find the Anders Army, the Polish battalion that had been formed in 1941, after the Germans turned on the Soviet Union and Stalin realized that the many Poles who were then languishing in Soviet jails would be put to better use fighting Germans. The exploits of this unit were already legendary, and Bumo had heard that a captain in the Tokmok refugee camp was planning to go to Iran to join the Anders Army.

  Travel from Frunze to Tokmok was, however, difficult. There were no easy roads, and the terrain was mountainous; some peaks were as high as five or six thousand meters. From one dwelling to another, the grown-up Bumo recalled, it was several kilometers. They weren’t even houses: they were yurts, the portable dwellings, made of felt and saplings, long used by the nomads of the Central Asian steppes. As Bumo and Naphtali and Abraham walked toward Tokmok there was a violent sandstorm, and they were forced to take refuge in a yurt inhabited by a young couple with a small child. These kindly local people offered food to the three strange-looking men: a kind of pastalike dough that had been filled with lamb. It was delicious.

  At about the time that Bumo was relishing this savory meal, Ciszko Szymanski, as I later found out, was shouting, If you kill her, then you should kill me, too!

  And they did.

  THE YOUNG COUPLE offered the three men a place to sleep. They gave them mattresslike rolls to put next to the oven: the place of honor. It was dreadfully hot during the day, but bitter cold at night. The next day the Uzbek nomads showed them the way they needed to go: across a river called Chu. Off they went. When they came to the place it was filled with other refugees. The three Bolechow men found employment with a veterinarian who lived in a beautiful house with a garden and a sauna. A garden! They worked in the garden. Soon it became clear that the rumor they’d heard about the captain who could lead them to the Anders Army was empty. Although the three of them lived relatively well and had plenty of food to eat, a typhus epidemic broke out in the camp. A quarantine was imposed. After the quarantine was lifted, the three decided to leave. They went to another place they’d heard of, called Antonufka, where there was another camp for Poles. When they arrived, it was clear that the camp was run on a military model. There were military tents. The people who took refuge there earned their keep by doing hard work in stone quarries. Discipline was strict: every morning there was a reveille. Bumo soon realized that here, too, there seemed to be little chance of finding someone who could help him make contact with the Anders Army. The people who ran the camp said that anyone who wanted to work had permission to return to Frunze; it was all right to leave. So Bumo went back to Frunze and got work in a factory that manufactured farm equipment. The boss of the company was a lawyer from Kraków named Ravner. He was married to a beautiful Uzbek woman and with her had had two children.

  As Adam Kulberg told this story on a snowy night early in 2004 in Denmark, I thought of another st
ory of an unlikely marriage I’d once heard, about that Jew named Shmiel Jäger from Dolina who’d married an Uzbek woman and had children with her who, as far as anyone knows, still live in Uzbekistan with their children and grandchildren, all of whom have a certain gene that, most likely, is a gene remotely connected to certain genes that I and my brothers and sister all have.

  It was here, in Frunze, that Bumo became ill for the first time. Realizing one night that he probably had appendicitis, he walked to the hospital, where an emergency surgery was performed on him. Because supplies were limited, Bumo received only a local anesthetic for this procedure, which is why he was able to watch as they cut him open and removed his bursting appendix. As he went into the operating room Bumo entrusted his most valuable possessions—most valuable not merely because they were, at that point, his only possessions—to a kindly nurse who had offered to take care of them if anything happened to him. For it was still true that even now, he talked to the photographs of his family every night. The kindly woman took the pictures and, as she promised she would, stored them carefully until he was well enough to leave. The woman was German, the wife of a Russian officer.

  After he recovered, Bumo Kulberg was determined to find an army unit, any army unit, with which he could fight. With the other two men he began retracing his fantastic steps. From Frunze they journeyed westward, back to Tashkent. It was here that Bumo rested for a while. For ten months, he worked at a Soviet champagne factory in Tashkent.

  A Soviet champagne factory in Tashkent?! Matt and I both exclaimed at the same time, laughing. Well, why not? We had drunk Soviet champagne in Nina’s cramped living room in Bolechow as her husband had played “Yesterday” on his rickety piano, had drunk it and had been incredulous that there was even such a thing as Soviet champagne.

  Finally, Bumo heard the news that he’d been longing for: some local people told him that they knew where he could apply to join the Polish regiment. He applied. Two weeks later, he was on a train from Tashkent to Moscow to a place called Divovo on the Oka River, where the unit was being trained, and where he happened to run into Amir Sapirstein, a famous thief from Bolechow. The young recruits lived in a vast forest. Their heads were shaved. Discipline was severe. Late in 1943, at which point Shumek and Malcia Reinharz and Jack Greene and his brother and father and Anna Heller Stern and Klara and Yankel Freilich and Josef and Shlomo Adler and Dyzia Lew were all sealed tightly and silently into their hiding places, Bumo Kulberg, in a forest by the Oka River, watched as three other young men who, like him, had thought that they wanted to become fighters against the Germans, but unlike him had tried to desert, were executed in a clearing in the wood. One was a Jew from Warsaw. It was so cold that the faces of the three bound men, who begged the commander for their lives at that point and promised they would fight for Poland, were, Adam remembered, the color of violets.

  In December Bumo was heading west toward the front. They stopped in Kiev. Berdetsov. They kept going west. They entered Polish territory. The weeks went by. He was in Lublin where, unbeknownst to him, his former neighbor Chaya Heller was pretending each day to be a Catholic girl called Anna Kucharuk; he was in Majdanek. A mere four kilometers from the center of Lublin, Majdanek was a camp that had begun life as an SS-run POW camp at around the time the first Aktion was taking place in Bolechow, but six months later became the site of killing operations that lasted until July 1944, by which time three hundred sixty thousand Jews, Poles, and prisoners of war had been gassed there. In Majdanek, Bumo found, everything had been burned; the Germans were covering their tracks. When he and the others got there, the crematoria were still hot. Bumo walked through the camp and saw, he said, mountains of suitcases, mountains of photographs that had once been keepsakes of the lives of Jews and were now indecipherable rubbish. For reasons he couldn’t quite explain, he took a few photographs and saved them.

  He kept going. From September 1944 until January 1945 he sat with his army across the Vistula from Warsaw doing nothing, although the Soviet army, with its little Polish regiments, was supposed to be the ally of the Poles of Warsaw who were attempting to rise against the Germans; doing nothing because Stalin, who was already considering the postwar picture, wasn’t interested in having a brave and active Polish resistance around after Germany had been crushed. It was at this time that Bumo Kulberg became an officer. After the Warsaw Uprising had been stomped to nothing, his army ground ahead into German territory. From April 15 to 16, 1945, Bumo fought in the offensive against Berlin. In some tiny part because Bumo Kulberg, a boy from Bolechow, was fighting there, Berlin fell.

  And so the war in Europe was over, and with it the Holocaust. What had begun the night of November 9, 1938, on Kristallnacht, had finally come to an end. Bumo Kulberg was not quite twenty-four years old. In Bolechow, the number of Jews who had emerged from their attics and cellars and chicken coops and forest bunkers was precisely forty-eight.

  Nearly sixty years later, the old man who young Bumo would become finished telling this story by saying, I am not the only one, there were thousands of Jews fighting in all the armies of the world.

  He paused and added, So I do not feel that I am something exceptional.

  DURING ALL THIS time, during all these adventures, Bumo had no idea what had become of his family. He had traveled and traveled, had walked across a good part of Asia, always thinking about his mother and father and Chana and Perla and Sala, but never knowing what had happened. As he sat with the Soviet army outside of Warsaw through the late months of 1944, this thought possessed him. He wrote a letter to a Polish family he knew well in Bolechow, called Kendelski, who had been his neighbors before he’d left town and begun his journey. He addressed the letter to Bronia Kendelska, but it was from her sister Maria that he finally received a reply, as Berlin fell.

  Adam Kulberg has this letter still, and that evening in Copenhagen he took it carefully in his hands and read it aloud to me and Matt. He would read a sentence or a phrase, and then Alena would translate, occasionally offering commentary at points where she thought it necessary.

  The letter sounded like this:

  Dear Bumo

  In answer to your letter,

  I would like to tell you

  that in the first Aktion

  the 28th of October ’41

  the Germans killed

  all your sisters.

  And in the last Aktion

  in Autumn ’43

  they killed your parents.

  In Bolechow is only forty people of your faith left.

  In your house is living

  Kubrychtowa

  who took the house even during the German occupation.

  (Alena stopped for a moment and said, This Kubrychtowa woman claimed that the house was the property of her parents! Then she went on reading.)

  By us, a lot of changes.

  You cannot describe them.

  Sister Bronia—my sister Bronia—

  together with my mother

  are in Rzeszów.

  Of the Israelites—

  (“Israelites,” Alena interrupted, I must say to you that in Polish when you say “Israelites,” it sounds very curious, like you don’t want to mention the word Jews. So you say Israelites)—

  Of the Israelites

  the only people that are left

  are the son of Salka Eisenstein,

  Hafter, Grünschlag, Kahane, Mondschein,

  and a lot of others

  that I don’t know—the names are not known to me.

  Try to come

  so you will know a lot of things.

  I am ending then.

  Greetings,

  Regards,

  Kendelska Maria, Bolechów 7 December ’44.

  That was the end of the letter. Adam stopped reading and Alena stopped translating. There was a little silence. Then she said, It’s the letter that changed my father’s life, you know?

  We remained silent. Adam said something to Alena, who then said to us, He says that
in first years after the war, whenever he was going somewhere by train, he would always watch all the faces because he always thought, Maybe I will recognize somebody, somebody from my family.

  Adam watched her translate this and said after a moment, I always look at the few pictures of them, and every night I say good night to the family, the Bolechow family.

  Alena paused and then said to me, I am saying this to you: my father is living with those people every day, they are very real and very alive for him. Looking at the pictures, every night, saying good-bye to them.

  I, who had spent three years searching for people I could never know, said nothing. Matt said, Let me take his picture holding the letter.

  Adam got up slowly, and they went over to the window. Once again I heard the k-shonck of the shutter of his Hasselblad. Then they returned to the table, and it was time for us to go. We’d spent far more time talking about Adam’s adventures than about Uncle Shmiel; but in the end it didn’t seem to matter. There were no more stories to tell.

  As we were getting up from the table and gathering our things, I had the feeling that there was something I wasn’t remembering. Just as we got to the door, I thought of what it was.

  Ask your father, I turned and told Alena, if he wanted someone who was reading my book to know something about Bolechow, one thing that should be remembered, what would it be?

  She relayed the question to her father, and after she stopped speaking a faint smile played on his lips. Then he said something slowly, three cadenced phrases in Polish that he recited in an almost ecclesiastical rhythm. Alena listened to her father and then looked up at me and translated the answer, an answer, I thought, that was worthy of someone who had seen more of the vast world than any Homeric hero.

  She said, He says, There were the Egyptians with their pyramids. There were the Incas of Peru. And there was the Jews of Bolechow.

  We flew home the next day. As it happened, it was February 29: a day that mostly doesn’t exist, a day that, like a ghost ship in a story, materializes out of nothingness only to disappear again before you’ve had a chance to grasp what it is; a day outside of time itself.